


Deus Brânquia Is Merciful

by Tyellas



Series: Lab T-4 [23]
Category: The Shape of Water (2017)
Genre: Adventure, Blackmail, Blood and Gore, Canon - Book & Movie Combination, Cat Death Reference, Complete, Drama, Gen, Ghosts, Horror, Illnesses, Inspired by Music, Magical Realism, Mild Sexual Content, Murder, Other, POV Lesbian Character, Suicide, Tension, Violence, Vomiting, Worldbuilding, for resilient readers, lots of book!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-05-30 20:38:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 41,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15104450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tyellas/pseuds/Tyellas
Summary: It’s late 2006. Strickland’s daughter, Tam, wants to enjoy her perfect California life. Instead, she's coerced into joining an Amazon river expedition. Their goal is impossible: to recapture the river creature once worshipped as Deus Brânquia, later known as the Asset.Or is it? Tam, skilled and steely, is a match for the determined crew. Along the rivers, there are tales about the gill-god. And the closer they get to Brazil’s wilds, the more reality blurs between enchantment and horror, sanity and madness, the living and the dead.It’s enough to make Tam believe that she may really be destined to find the creature - and his mysterious mate. There’s no saying what will happen if she does. For Deus Brânquia may be merciful, but Tam, for good or ill, is all too human.





	1. Code Name: Deus Brânquia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Who wants to journey to the Amazon on a hunt for an immortal cryptid? Not Tam – she’s built a life around being the opposite of her despised father, Richard Strickland. But she’s about to receive an offer she can’t refuse.

_If Strickland knows anything about untamed territory, it is that it stains you, inside and out. You do not wear white clothing unless you do not know what the hell you are doing…_

* * *

There was no reason, Tam thought, for her to fail at anything. Especially something as good for her as a morning meditation.

From the sunroom off her home office, Tam gazed over the dry Southern California plains. She reminded herself that she was lucky to have this view. She loved the climate here. _Positive thoughts_ , she told herself. _Mindfulness._ A daily meditation was supposed to be time for her. Half an hour to set aside her work and her worries and her tooth-grinding fury.

Later today, she’d be meeting with a federal think tank about a consulting job. Her lover, Hosna, had a key interview for her own U.S. citizenship application. What was left of Tam’s family was acting up. Forty-plus years on, Tam brooded, she and Tim were still picking out the shrapnel of having Richard Strickland as their father.

Was it therapy time again? Probably, when she had a moment to breathe. For now, attempting to meditate would have to do.  

It was late October. On top of a small bookcase in the sunroom, Tam’s meditation altar was set up for autumn. An orange cloth, a few small bowls, and a gift from a grateful client: a carved-bone statue of Kwan Yin. The little goddess of mercy was perched serenely on a fish. With one finger, Tam touched the statue’s delicate topknot. “I wish you’d talk to me,” she murmured.

With that, Tam crossed her long legs under her to sit on the floor. Insight, she decided. She would meditate for insight. Tam closed her eyes, breathed slowly. The idea was to look into her eyelids’ irregular darkness and quiet her mind.

She failed immediately. Her thoughts still raced. But she was, at first, pleased with the path they took. They circled around her yearning to connect with the world’s spirits, with a goddess like Kwan Yin. To feel the great forces that moved the universe.

That connection hadn’t eluded her for lack of trying. She’d spent a lifetime on the edges of spirituality and tradition. Teenaged Ouija boards, college tarot cards and clumsy Wicca, two archaeology degrees. Work as a consulting archaeologist and mediator had brought her to sacred places on six continents. Each one had the same feel as the churches of her childhood: that something was missing. She’d only had one true encounter with something uncanny, otherworldly.

And the memory deepened her inner darkness into something red and raw.

* * *

She’d still been Tammy, then. Ten, almost eleven, bursting out of those girlish early-Sixties dresses. It had always been a relief to take them off for her pajamas. That night, she’d hustled her little brother into his pajamas, too, made sure he brushed his teeth and lumped into bed. She was helping Mom. Because Dad had gotten angry while they were all watching TV. After yelling, then terrible silence, he’d strode out of the house into the pouring rain. Mom, face pale, voice bright, had said it was bedtime. Then she’d followed Dad into the roaring blackness.

With Timmy settled, Tammy had peeked out. She’d tiptoed down the stairs. Nobody was in sight. The living room was dim, its air strangely warm. The television set their father had just broken, setting off his rage, frizzed in unending static. Its gray light was the only illumination, giving the gold and avocado room a sickly tinge. Tammy had, conscientiously, turned out the other lights. She was sorry, now. The static was creepy.

As her toes dug into the living room’s shag carpet, something loped into the room. It was half Tammy’s height. Fur bristled between its shoulders. It made noises between a bark and a low, rough growl. It was an animal. Tammy stopped, thrilled. Was it a puppy, a stray seeking shelter?

No. It wasn’t a pet. It walked wrong, for that, and it was trailing dark, tangled vines. One of the vines lashed – its tail. It levered itself up on its knuckles. It was, shockingly, a monkey. One of the wild jungle animals their father had ranted about, snuffling around their living room! Maybe it had escaped from the lab where Dad was working?

The creature turned to her and bared its teeth.

Tammy retreated up a few stairs, heart pounding. The monkeys in her books didn’t have fangs like that. And their eyes didn’t gleam an evil, unworldly green.

She and the monkey both reacted to voices outside. Her father’s shouting, her mother’s pleading, his voice taking over. She covered her ears. The monkey grinned wider, teeth shining greenish-white, as if to confirm what she already knew: _you’re next_. Tammy didn’t know when. She didn’t know what would give her away as not being the perfect girl her father insisted on. But something would, one day, and then…

With a final screaming bark, the terrible monkey loped back out again, following its leash of vines.

A moment later, Tammy heard the roar of her father’s Cadillac. Its engine revved like the monkey’s barking, tires squealing off into the rain. Tammy stayed frozen on one stair, her gut clenched to a hard rubber ball – until she heard the door click. But it clicked softly. The steps that followed were hesitant, slow, human.

Her mother limped into the room and stopped short. The gray static-light carved out Mom’s cheekbones and the hollows of her eyes, caught her lips parting in misery. “Tammy.”

“Mom – there was – ”  A monkey in the living room? Impossible for a big, grown-up girl like her to say. But Mom was looking pretty impossible too, her makeup running, her nice clothes spattered with mud. For once, she wasn’t perfect, either. They’d gazed at each other across the static-dim room, both unable to speak.

Finally, Mom said, “Is your brother asleep?” Tammy had nodded.

“You need to get some sleep, too. We’re going to have a big day tomorrow.” Mom had limped over. Tammy was three stairs up, taller than Mom for the first time. Mom had looked up to her to whisper, “We’re leaving in the morning. You and me and Timmy. Just us.”

Tammy had hopped down and hugged Mom then, hard. Mom must have seen the monkey, too, known its message, even while fighting with Dad. And she wouldn’t let that jungle monster get them…

* * *

Tam opened her eyes, throat tight. The sunroom was blinding.

Such a strange night, forty-two years ago. A lifetime past, a different world. The next morning, before Mom had managed to rent a car, she’d been told their father had died. It had been the world’s biggest relief. Tam knew why she was remembering all that today. She didn’t like it much.

Tam swayed upright, stretched. It was good to be reminded that she was six feet tall, that the twinge in her shoulder came from throwing a man in Krav Maga practice yesterday. She strode out for more reminders of who she was now.

The vanilla smell of old books in Tam’s office soothed her. The walls were packed with photos and framed articles from Tam’s archaeology work. She surveyed them with satisfaction. The teams she’d worked with at thirty different locations. Interviews. Two magazine covers: one of her alone, one with Hosna. Friends and chosen family, adventure, success. The challenge was, as always, to keep it all going.

Another client gift was on her desk: a retro-style day-by-day calendar. Tam ripped away yesterday for the current date. _Friday, October 27, 2006._ Each page had a pithy saying on the back. She turned the page she held to read: _Life is but the shipwreck of our plans_. Like she didn’t have enough problems. She crumpled the page into a ball, tossed it into the trash, kept going.

Tam took the airy wooden stairs two at a time. On the landing, she paused, with a smile of pure pleasure for the scene before her.

Their high-ceilinged bedroom was flooded with morning light. Sunshine gleamed on light wood furniture, rumpled white linens. Fitted birch closets and drawers concealed the clutter Tam hated. The walls were bare save for one austere cedar frame, sheltering a slab of Bablyonian cuneiform. Opulence came from carpet upon crimson carpet padding the floor, and from the lushly beautiful woman lounging across the bed.

Hosna wore a white tank top and thong, fine cotton hugging her tawny-rose flesh. Her rich fall of hair, usually inky black, caught copper highlights in the morning sun. As she lolled on the bed, she was surrounded by her pets, three rescued Persian cats. The youngest cat was playfully belly-up in front of Hosna. She murmured nonsense while she and the cat took turns patting each other’s noses.

“You two are the cutest,” Tam said.

Hosna half-turned without getting up. “Habibi!” She patted the bed. Before Tam could join her, Hosna shattered everything by saying, “The Baltimore lawyer called back.”

Tam stopped short. “And? What did she say?”

Hosna raised herself smoothly and crossed her legs, spine elegantly straight. The two larger cats curved around her, their tails arcing like fans. “What your brother is doing is completely legal.”

Tam reeled, blinded by white anger. “I’ll disown him anyway. That _motherfucker_.”

Hosna smiled wickedly. “Almost!”

Tam clenched her hands. “It’s _not funny_ , Hosna!” She realized she’d screamed it when the cats all fled.

There was an animal whine behind Tam. She turned. “Falada!” But her beloved Russian wolfhound, her childhood dream of a dog made real, hesitated, whimpering. Wolfhounds were sensitive. If Falada was scared of her, she’d gone too far. Again.

Tam turned back to find that Hosna had stood up. A head shorter and ten years younger than Tam, she had gone ageless and regal, her curves as dramatic as an Astarte figurine. She stayed silent for long enough that Tam knew, without doubt, she’d chosen her next words. But she didn’t shout in her turn. “My Tamar. My well of cold water. Nobody makes us angry like our families. I understand with all my soul.”

Tam bowed her head, relieved and ashamed. Hosna Al-Hazred had suffered far more than Tam from a difficult family.  

Hosna went on. Her slightly British lilt was pitched to soothe. “Tim has always had that American-man crazy, yes? The guns, the conspiracy theories, the rules in his own head.”

“Like my father…” Tam muttered.

“Like my brothers in Syria. The ones still alive after the wars.” Hosna opened her hands. “Think about that and, this matter with Tim…maybe it is not the worst?”

Tam glared. “Just because it’s legal doesn’t make it less disgusting. Perverse. _Entitled!_ I don’t know if I can ever trust him again.”

Hosna looked resigned. “To think I sat through Tim’s bloody wedding for this. All those people from his university, that Miskatonic, slithering up to me. _‘Oh, scion of Al-Hazred, aid my venture._ _’_ Getting between me and the cannoli on the dessert table! As my mother's mother said: anyone tells you that you are the chosen one, run the other way. Fast.”

“You think that’s the sort of line he used to – ugh. I can’t talk about it anymore. I need to get in the headspace for this client meeting. Who are they, again?”

Hosna talked over her shoulder as she chose her clothes for the day. “Occam Strategy and Recorporation. Federal money, but work in South America. The man was all blah blah, high security, innovative disruption, Princeton Ph.D – words that mean nothing.”

Tam opened one of her own closets and reached for a pantsuit, white wool twill. “I’ll dress execudyke. What else?”

“It is in two hours, at March Air Base, so hurry. Your bag is ready, there. I ask them ‘why you’ and they say something about our consulting in Iraq in 2003. But they do not ask for me.” Hosna shrugged eloquently.

Tam’s lip curled. “That’s a lot of nerve after the way Iraq worked out. If they’re military - wait. You said South America. Ethics consulting, then, has to be. Land use or biotech rights get sensitive.”

Absently, Tam went to the dresser to apply sunscreen and brow powder.  Her blonde hair, cupping her head short in the back, an androgynous-long sweep of bangs in the front, still shone perfectly. But her brows were fading into grey-white. In the mirror, strengthening those brows, she frowned. The expression masked her with her father’s bulldog bluntness. Now that she was fifty-three, this happened more and more. She forced herself to relax again. It occurred to her that ethics consulting in South America was a good chance to be the opposite of her father.  His last assignment there had been in Brazil.

Feeling better, Tam picked up her finishing touch: the lucky bag. Tam’s mom, Elaine, had died eleven years ago, but she’d sworn by the lucky bag. It had been a strangely neutral accessory for hyperfemme Elaine, rich red-brown leather with brass buckles. Mom had picked it up as an advertising agency secretary. An artist, “such a nice man, I wish I could remember his name,” had given it to her. Mom had sworn that whenever she carried the bag, things went her way. Its substantial presence was an ideal foil for Tam’s height. Somehow, it was always the perfect size for whatever she wanted to carry.  Tam peeked inside to find her portfolio, a notebook, pens, her cellphone and its charger, her wallet, one of her favorite Clif bars, and a bottle of water.

Tam realized that Hosna was snapping drawers shut, tossing a pair of her own shoes into the middle of the floor, clutter and noise. She turned. “What? What is it?”

Hosna sniffed, “I organize your meeting, I talk to your lawyer, all that conversation you are too disgusted to have. When I have an interview for citizenship in two hours myself.”

“It’s the next to last part, isn’t it? You’ll ace it. You know more American history than they do.”

Hosna lifted her pointed chin. Her eyes were very black. “But with my Syrian passport, though I pay taxes here for twenty years, I must prove it. Why can we not be citizens of the world? I do this today, I get ready to give up where I am from, to be here with you. You don’t even say good luck.”

“Hosna…I’m sorry…all of this shit going on…” Tam could tell, as she said it, that it was too little, too late.

Hosna turned a cold shoulder. “Go talk to these people who don’t want me on their planes. Get this work so I can say at my interview we still have a business that employs me.” She swayed into the bathroom, every strand of her hair bouncing with indignation, and slammed the well-designed door.

Tam pinched the bridge of her nose. “Hosna…”

The door muffled Hosna’s reply. “Go. Go or you are late.”

Hosna was right. Tam tried to raise her voice without yelling. “I’ll stop by that French bakery you like, bring you a croissant…I love you…”

As Tam said it, her dog, Falada, slid back beside her. She knelt beside the beautiful animal, inhaling Falada’s clean-fur smell. Falada licked Tam’s face and followed her owner obediently downstairs, to her crate. The young wolfhound still had a wild streak. It was hard for her to overcome her instinct to hunt down the cats. Tam locked the dog in and went out to her white Range Rover.

She gazed up at their house before driving off. Its modern angles perched perfectly between dry earth and sky, with Mount San Jacinto in the background. Hosna’s herbs spilled from terracotta pots on stairs and pathways. Tam felt her petty failure still weighing her gut. When she returned, she’d bring half a dozen croissants, an armload of flowers. She’d pet all the animals. She’d make it right.

But, first: Occam.

* * *

“Tammy Strickland? In here.”

Tam frowned. It was maddening, the way the old name stuck around. Official types loved to default to the birth certificate. Today, it had followed her to this bland, isolated building on the dusty edge of March Air Base.

She chased the voice into an even blander meeting room, to find a man out of place in Southern California, in a polo shirt and a blazer with gold buttons. Maybe the clothes were some ironic statement. He was easily two decades younger than Tam. His waving hair was the brown-blonde of maple sugar. Maybe he was decent-looking if you liked patrician pretty-boy types. In the windowless room, the fluorescent light gave his fair skin a livid cast. He stayed seated on one side of a table.

“Tamara Caldwell, actually,” she said. She'd changed back to her mother's maiden name thirty-one years ago.

The man rose to shake her hand, with a sour glance for the six inches of height Tam had on him. “Hayden Preston. Doctor Hayden Preston.” Tam noted how he repeated it. A freshly minted Ph.D., this one, not used to introducing himself as a doctor.

“What’s your speciality?” she asked.

“Cellular resilience and telomere biochemistry.”

Tam sat down in the only other chair, across from him. “Interesting. And unusual, that a government biochemist needs a consulting archaeologist. I’ve got my portfolio here. It’ll help you understand my background and what I do.” Perhaps he’d mistaken her for an anthropologist. That had happened before.

Preston mused over her press clippings. “Bachelor’s from one of the Seven Sisters - one of the schools that count. Ivy League Master’s in archaeological ethics. Four languages. Interesting fieldwork through your old girls’ network. Met your partner while negotiating for medieval texts in Syria, brought her back to the U.S., launched your consulting business together. National Geographic byline… a few TV appearances…your alumni magazine put you on the cover with the headline ‘Research Role Models.’ Cute.” Tam found herself more irritated than flattered.

“All great stuff. But I’ll be honest – what we really need is _you_.” Preston slid the portfolio back with a smile. “Your fieldwork background is a tremendous bonus. As is your availability. It’s like you were made for this.”

Tam knew she should smile back, but his grin was a little too fixed for her taste. “If you think I’ve got something special to bring to your project, let’s talk.”

Preston stayed smiling. “That’s the perfect way to phrase it. We’d like you to join us for some fieldwork.”

“You said South America?”

“It might range through a couple of countries. Once we have a guarantee of your participation, I can provide particulars. The compensation’s substantial.” He offered Tam a folder from his side. “If we succeed, there’ll be more benefits that I can share with you. It’ll be groundbreaking. Revolutionary. Watson and Crick levels of discovery.” Tam raised an eyebrow. Watson and Crick had won a Nobel prize for their work on DNA - while under-crediting a lot of findings from a female researcher. She'd died in obscurity.

She opened the folder to find a contract in triplicate. “Mmmh. That is substantial.” Double her usual rate: tempting. She kept reading. “Failure to deliver…compliance with all military staff…unlimited engagement?” Her signature here would sign her life away. She inhaled and exhaled mindfully, working to keep her temper cooled.

“It’s a sensitive project. That’s why we’ve set those conditions.”

Tam slid the contract folder back to him. “Fair enough. They’re not conditions that suit me. Is there a chance we can make this work for both of us?”

“Oh, definitely.” Preston’s smile tightened into a smirk.  “I did get your complete dossier. Very detailed. Shame about that ex stalking you for a few years. And those fibroids of yours – again, if this goes well, maybe that can be fixed. More to the point, you’ve maxed out your available lines of credit and your share of your family trust fund for this year. Can you afford to say no?”

Tam went cold for one second. Then the rage kicked in. “My health is fine – my ex – that was  –  none of this is _any_ of your fucking business.” She stood up. “Is this a blackmail attempt? This is 2006, for God’s sake.”

Preston stayed seated. “Occam doesn’t attempt anything. We’re here to succeed. Whatever it takes.” He steepled his hands. “Your current partner, one Hosna Al-Hazred, is not a citizen. She doesn’t have a green card, either.”  

“Don’t drag her in. She took your call. You didn’t even want her here.”

“Her work visa is through your consulting business. A set-up that looks kind of flimsy, lately. After 9/11, now that the Department of Homeland Security’s taken off, a Syrian national with her background is highly suspicious.”

Preston opened his hands back up, ducking his chin, all false surrender. “Go ahead and decline. Walk away. No repercussions to you. Might not be so bad for her. Homeland Security’s irregular about how they handle female terrorism suspects. I’m pretty sure they don’t get sent to Guatanamo Bay. Though that might change for an Al-Hazred.”

Tam heard one of the curtains shift. She glanced to see a camo-clad man the size of a refrigerator beside the door. A second man, narrow and greasy, flanked the door’s other side.

Preston repeated, loud enough for them to hear, “She can walk. It’s her choice.”

Tam looked from man to man. She’d snatched the lucky bag away from a mugger in Hamburg, screamed back at a ring of street harassers in Cairo, talked down rifle-wielding bandits in Tulum. But here, the threat and danger weren’t to her. Hosna wasn’t there to choose. Tam was. “If I sign…does that get Hosna citizenship?”

Preston’s closed lips turned up. “Success means I’ll be in a position to ask for _anything_ I want. I already said I’d be pleased to share the benefits of that.”

Tam, slowly, brought herself back down to his level, at the table.

The only thing left to do was to read every line about how screwed she was. Her name was, unfortunately, legally correct where it mattered. Tam made Preston give her a pen to drag through her signature several times. The pens in her bag were too good for this: Hosna had touched them.

Preston counter-signed for Occam and handed her one copy. This done, he cheered up visibly. Like he hadn’t just threatened Hosna, coerced Tam, violated their shared privacy. “Now I can tell you what this is really about.” He flourished a remote control. “I’ve got a Powerpoint!”

Tam slumped. “Isn’t that against the Geneva Convention?”

Preston talked over her shoulder to the two military men. “You guys should watch this, too. Really brings it all to life.” He added, for Tam, “They’re our security for this. Very limited group to maintain confidentiality.” The curtains on one wall slid away as a projector wheezed to life.

The first slide was arresting: a photo of a retro dinner party, heavy and glittering, everything black and white. “This is where it all began… a diplomatic dinner in D.C. in 1960. That man there is a Brazilian diplomatic attaché. To his right is one General C.W. Hoyt. They got talking over cigars. The Brazilian told Hoyt about an amphibian man, a gill god, down in the Amazon.”

Another slide: half a highlighted map of Brazil, half a vintage photo of indigenous Amerinds, surly at the camera’s exploitation. “Sounds like folklore, but the Brazilian insisted it was real. Real enough that their natives were sabotaging oil rigs to protect it.”

Tam half-laughed. “Good for them. I see that a lot. Indigenous groups adapting their lore and past restrictions to new situations.”

“It was a situation, all right. Hoyt said he had the man to fix it.” The next slide felt like a trick. Tam saw it, at first, as two different men, her brother and her father. But they were both Richard Strickland. On the left, he was a young G.I. who, shockingly, knew how to smile.  Something had changed between that and the photo on the right. That was the Strickland Tam remembered as her father, strict and hairtrigger-haunted, even as he let Hoyt pin a medal on him.

“That’s when your father was made a colonel, highest field-active ranking. Hoyt’s right-hand man. Hoyt sent him down to Brazil to resolve the ‘situation’ and help America at the same time. By capturing the gill god - Deus Brânquia in Portuguese. The goal, at the time was to analyse Deus Brânquia’s amphibious lung structure. Somehow use it to help the U.S. win the space race.”

“That’s…kind of ridiculous.”

Preston laughed with relief. “I know, right? Like a really awful B-movie. But you know what kind of world we live in. You see the news. Super-powered people, paranormal incidents. All gaining momentum back then in ‘62. As part of that, Deus Brânquia turned out to be real. Colonel Strickland proved it by capturing him and bringing him back to America.”

“To that lab in Baltimore.” 

“The first generation of Occam. Where the creature’s true potential was recognized by THIS man.”

Again, a pair of photographs. A neutral-looking white man in glasses and a lab coat, in ‘60s black and white. A sardonic, dramatic man, pale even in ‘70s Kodachrome, glaring from under a hat and over those glasses. Unlike her father, this man’s scars were visible, tightening his right cheek in the newer photo. “Dimitri Antonovich Moskenov – later known as Doctor Robert Hoffstetler.” Preston’s voice warmed with admiration. “Amazing guy, genius, intelligence agent, polymath. He was brought in to analyse Deus Brânquia. Kept telling everyone, hey, this thing’s been alive since the Devonian, millions of years. It’s functionally immortal. He was ahead of his time. We’ve got a far better understanding now – thanks to Watson and Crick, who I mentioned earlier. If we could study Deus Brânquia again with what we know now…with our advances in genetic engineering…we could make humans immortal, too.”

Maybe Preston did belong in Southern California after all, with dreams like that. “So what about Deus Brânquia?”

"He's here." Another slide. Tam recoiled. The entire image was hideous, from the examination table with cuffs and chains to the humanoid thing held down on it. Its jaw was half-unhinged, mouth open unnaturally wide. Teeth flashed, fins bristled, claws curled. The slimy glare of its rough-scaled, muscle-striated skin was worst of all. “None of the specimen photography was very good. Couldn’t get it to hold still. There’s some sketches on file, but most of them aren't what I’d call scientific.”

To get him to change the slide, Tam asked, “What happened in the end?”

“Well! Hoffstetler, he got frustrated. He didn’t want the creature butchered and put in formaldehyde. He confessed later that he used old contacts from his immigrant youth to get in touch with the Russians – to kidnap it for their own labs. Your dad caught on pretty quickly. But Hoffstetler had help.” Finally, the slide changed. And Tam gasped, because she knew these faces.

Giles Dupont was a vague and pleasant memory for her. She’d dragged Tim to the man’s house, once, to apologise for what their father had done. It had to be him because a picture of his housekeeper-co-tenant was also there, and she’d never forget the word she’d had with Zelda _. Good of you to come out this way, have your say. A pretty girl like you, you look after yourself. Never trust a man._ Tam had smiled and said she never planned to. They’d both laughed. 

The third picture was why they’d gone to meet Dupont. A frail being, captured at the moment in a woman’s life where being a waif shifted into something sharp and witchy. A face that had made Tam curdle with guilt when she’d found similar photographs in her dead father’s belongings, years later. He’d shot and killed the woman: Elisa Esposito.

“Occam cleaning staff. They got Deus Brânquia out. Esposito sheltered him as they waited for the Russians’ pick-up at a nearby dock. Your father caught up to them as they were escaping. Uh – I’m sorry to bring up your father’s death.” It was the most human thing Preston had said.

Tam inhaled. “Go on.”

Preston spoke cautiously. “Esposito and Deus Brânquia had…some kind of…attachment. Maybe it was a mating imprint on his side.”

“Ew,” Tam muttered.

Preston sounded abashed. “It’s, well, evidence supports it. Plus it ties into what happened. Your father shot them both. Witnesses say Esposito threw herself in front of the creature. She died – but Deus Brânquia survived. He, uh, struck back at your father, took Esposito’s body, and vanished in the water. As your father died.”

Tam had been waiting, as this story progressed, for Preston to mention the man who’d killed her father. A South American counter-agent of some kind, based on the news article around it - Mom had given her and Tim the article, eleven years after it happened. It sank in now: that man had never existed.  One of Tim’s favorite conspiracy theories, that there’d been a cover-up around their father’s death, was true.

From that article, Tam had built up her own image of Elisa in her mind. A woman who’d helped a political prisoner being abused as an experimental subject. Bravely helping him escape Strickland. Falling in forbidden love, seeing beyond race and prejudice. A woman ahead of her time.  Instead, Elisa had been transferring a terrifying cryptid from one minder to another. And something perverse had happened along the way.

If her father, that rigid, righteous man, had picked up on that…

Tam had spent her whole life invested in how wrong Richard Strickland had been. Maybe he’d been right, that once, about the jungle monster that killed him in the end.

Preston was going on. "We know all that because Hoffstetler confessed to it all afterwards. His value to us was so high that we took him on as one of our agents in return for his co-operation. He went on to a second Ph.D and some amazing work in the science around the 'supers. He was under consideration for a Nobel Prize when he died in '84." A different map slide of Brazil came up, with another highlighted area. “Since then there’ve been a few sightings. A lighthouse in South Carolina in late ’62. A Tulum mangrove swamp in 1971. Most importantly, a few reports from Brazil. Particularly in the upper Amazon basin. You can see it marked here, where Peru, Brazil, and Colombia connect. It’s the Wild West in a jungle out there. A mess of nature reserves, local tribes, and logging gangs. That’s where our work today comes in. We go there, we find Deus Brânquia, we bring him back, and we start to change the world.”

“Yeah, great. Why _me_?”

“I’m going so I can start doing research immediately. Last time, they lost a month by not working in transit. _You_ are coming because of…” Preston forced himself to say it, “What our probability analysts say.”

He sent the slide show to a black screen: the end. “A quantum theorist read some of Hoffstetler’s old papers. Had the hypothesis that if an expedition tried to recreate the original as far as possible it might succeed. They ran some numbers. Apparently, one of the factors contributing to a high probability of success is you, as one of Richard Strickland’s children.”

Tam said, flatly, “What.” _My brother fucking works for the FBI, why not him,_ Tam thought. But Tim, like their father, had been damaged by what he'd done with a gun in his hand. And the thought of Occam’s operators pressuring what Tim held nearest and dearest, right now… Tam would have, that morning, thrown Tim under a bus. But she couldn't throw him to Occam's brand of manipulation and live with herself.

Preston met her eyes, twisting his mouth. “I thought it was magical thinking bullcrap, too. But we know there’s paranormal powers out there now. It’s a new field. This is built on the proto-science around that. I'm willing to give it a try. Because, in this case, success really does mean the world. Not just immortality, but the kind of immortality people dream of. Living forever in a perfect form, always rejuvenating.” Preston put his hands on the table and stood up. His eyes were still locked to hers. “It'll move humanity to the next level of being.”

Tam admitted, “I can see why you wanted me to sign, first.”

“We're not risking confidentiality by having you leave at this juncture. Willie and Joe here will set you up with tropical gear, plus chits for the base exchange.” He picked up the contract folder. “I’ll let our team know to send through a substantial advance on this to your account.”

Give Preston an inch, Tam noted bitterly, and he took a mile. “I guess you've got the account number already.”

“Would you like to make a call home, now or later?”

A phrase pitched to give her the illusion of choice. “Now,” Tam said.

Preston turned around to fumble with cables and a conference-call speaker. Hoffstetler had been both a scientist and an intelligence agent. Preston probably was, too. The call would be supervised, of course. God knew what else was behind the curtains. But she’d get the essentials across. She’d pushed herself, remade herself, survived and more. Almost always, she’d gotten what she wanted. She’d make it through this bizarre cryptid hunt and come out on top, her life back, more secure than ever.

And she had the lucky bag. That was irrationally comforting, even as Tam wondered if there really was something to it. With a bizarre gill-god out there, code named Deus Brânquia, and she, Tam, the chosen one who was going to find it, there had better be.

Finally, she was talking to Hosna. "Darling. It’s me. Where are you?”

Hosna was just leaving her interview, horrified at how it had gone. Tam realized Preston had made his threats right when Hosna was on her way to Los Angeles’ central immigration office. Hosna could have been scooped up immediately if Tam had refused.  

Tam listened, then listened some more. “I’m sorry, darling. I’m so sorry. But I’m so glad you’re out of there. Here? Uh…well, it’s still going on. I'm afraid I won’t be bringing you that croissant..."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- _Habibi_ = Arabic for dearest, darling, beloved, bestie.  
>  \- the last name Al-Hazred = A link to the Lovecraftian elements in another TSOW story of mine, _The Man of the Future_ : the last name of a poet and magician from H.P. Lovecraft's canon.


	2. The Black River

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Amazon expedition launches. Tam meets the rest of the crew, and learns they all have their own reasons to find Deus Brânquia.

_“Smoke, drink, enjoy! It is all you will know of luxury for much time. It is good you came no later…_ _Josefina_ _is impatient to depart. Like Amazonia, it waits for no man.” Strickland doesn’t like the implication…_

* * *

Tam was still wearing her white suit two days later.

Before leaving the States, Tam had received a duffel of tropical camouflage gear. She had also, at Occam’s expense, pillaged a military base store for further clothes and toiletries. But putting any of that on would make her one of them. So she’d stayed in her own garments for five flights, from Los Angeles to San Diego to Lima to Manaus to Barcelos.

Along the way, she was by default side by side with Preston. Their minders, Willie and Joe, catnapped on either side as Preston went on, and on. High security had denied Preston an audience until Tam had joined them. He was overflowing with information, history, and theories related to ‘their expedition’.

“It’s unbelievable that they kept barely any specimens. Their research window with Deus Brânquia missed out on both biopsy sampling and an in-depth understanding of DNA. God, Hoffstetler really was something. He almost made it out, Deus Brânquia and all. Killed a guard under your dad’s nose, one jab with a poisoned syringe.  Hoffstetler confessed later. They would’ve had no idea otherwise. Check this out, it’s a copy of Hoffstetler’s journal. I know archaeology’s not the same as science but –-”

Tam said,  “Archaeologists do have some grasp of other areas of science. Carbon dating. Quaternary geology. Little things like that. Plus, my sister’s a marine biologist.”

“Mmm, came up in your dossier. Stepsister, though, doesn’t count.”

Tam fumed. After years of watching her stepsister coddling creatures in aquariums, she’d probably do better than Preston at keeping Deus Brânquia alive in transit. For the tenth time, Tam folded her arms, doing her best to block him out. Sooner or later, some morsel of information would draw her to speak with him again.

Their final stop, Barcelos, did Tam’s white suit in. A sign at the grass-runway airport told Tam that Barcelos was the tropical fish capital of Brazil. Loaded into an open-cab truck with Preston’s crates and cases of gear, they rattled down an unpaved road. The exposed ground was red, as if peeling away the rainforest here revealed not dirt, but russet flesh. By the time they hit asphalt again, Tam’s suit was spattered with rusty streaks like dried blood. The open-air racket shut down conversation, at least. They passed vividly painted houses, colonial-style civic buildings, some with lawns for breathing room, others pressed hard by darkly opaque tropical greenery.

The truck jerked to an abrupt stop at a few piers, well before central Barcelos. There had been no going downhill or change in terrain. This was flat country. “Guess this is us,” Preston announced. The truck’s Brazilian soldiers, taciturn behind greenish-black face paint, began unloading. Tam seized her lucky bag and followed Preston to the pier.

Preston’s over-sharing meant they both recognized their boat. The _Guilhermino_ was alone at one extended, rickety pier. While two tourist riverboats nearby looked like floating glass condominiums, the _Guilhermino_ was entirely made of brown wood. But, as with the tourist boats, open deck space was less of a priority than cabins and railings. A stair curved handsomely from the _Guilhermino_ _’_ _s_ first deck to its second. On top, the roof deck was shaded with a forest-green canopy. The river water lapping around the boat’s bow was dark, stained-looking where it ran shallow. Pollution, Tam thought, bitterly.

From the main deck, a handful of bronzed faces eyed them curiously. One figure, in a white shirt, waved wildly and darted to the gangplank. Tam wondered who, amongst them, was another human roll of the dice. For Occam had also recruited the last descendant of Raul Henríquez, the previous expedition’s captain.  

Preston had yet to connect with this Remy Henríquez, but he had copies of Remy’s emails, and was satisfied so far. “Seems like a real asset. Super motivated. Trilingual, no-nonsense. Knows the ins and outs of travel here, including getting around the Amazon backcountry. We’ll be on the boat and on our way in no time.”

They were being greeted by a woman, her slim waist a contrast to her baggy cargo pants. “Doctor Preston! We are exciting to meet you in person. _Bemvindos al Guilhermino._ Welcome to your boat.”

“Thank you. Thank you very much. Is Remy around?”

The woman’s mouth twisted as she balanced a hand on one hip. “I am Remy. Remy Santa Maria Chang Henríquez Mão de Ferro. Our names are very long in Brazil. So, all here call me Diosa. Like my father past, I am your captain.”

Diosa was close to Tam’s age and, unusually, her height. Preston gaped. “Why, uh, why Diosa?”

When Diosa smiled, her long dark eyes, graced with an epicanthic fold, narrowed down to sparkling slits. Her flat nose was spangled with freckles. From under a fisherman’s hat, a dark-dyed braid waved down her back. “Spanish, yes. From my father. He was Mexican.” Tam was stabbed with jealousy. Raul Henríquez had loved his daughter enough to nickname her _little goddess_.

Once they were on board, Preston didn’t give Diosa a second glance. “This is the boat? It’s smaller than it looked in photos. Way smaller.”

On the spot, Diosa’s English slipped a bit. “This is for the little rivers. No more than thirty meters long, go inside the forest. In the past this boat is professors, students, expeditions. The hold is half for laboratory. You will see. Come, here is crew.” She called out in Portuguese, clapping her hands.

Three – no, four – other people came down and up to cluster around the gangplank. She said something to them in Portuguese, then switched back to English.

“Our first mate and engineer, with us from Peru. Albondigas. In a hurry, call him Albi.” Diosa said it dead seriously for someone introducing a man as _Meatballs._ Beneath a straw porkpie hat, Albi’s eyes twinkled, daring them to laugh. Tam heard Willie, out of all of them, turn a chortle into a snort. He spoke Spanish, too? Interesting and unexpected. “You ask for the connections. He, too, knew my father. I trust him with my life.”

“Next, the grandson of a hunter hired by your Colonel Strickland. His name is Verdugo. He is a hunter, too, of the largest animals.” Verdugo’s flashy good looks were going strong into middle age. He came down and took Tam’s hand, bowing his dark, curling beard over it for a little speech, an excuse for his green eyes to rove her. Tam only understood one word out of ten. Her Spanish wasn’t going to help her with Portuguese as much as she’d hoped.

“Also our most expert guide, a forest tracker whose honorable name challenges my pronunciation. We are very fortunate to have him with us. We may call him Xono.” Xono left his greeting at a nod and _Bom dia_. His mouth was extended on either side by  three blue-black chains of tattoos. Thick black bars, more ink, sliced his tanned arms. A long spar of surgical-looking steel pierced his nose above his heavy metal T-shirt. This man was picking and choosing from the old forest and the new Brazil.

“And final, our cook and cleaner, Senhora Yaní. She is very experienced managing on this river. She does not speak English, only Portuguese.” The sehnora’s face was pulled down with displeasure. She was short, stocky, creased and grayed from a hard life, hair in two old-fashioned braids. Tam only saw her for a moment. She retreated as Diosa began to speak again.  

“Before you go any further, I tell you the rules. Not many, but each for reason. You do _not_ swim in the river. You do _not_ drink alcohol. You do _not_ make loud between dinner and breakfast. You do _not_ disrespect our cook: you call her Sehnora and you leave her alone. Most important, in an emergency you listen to me. We are towing a smaller boat -- ”

Preston cut her off. “Uh – no. I’m in charge here. In case of an emergency our top priority should be salvaging findings and specimens.”

Diosa glared. “Do you want to die? To drown or be in a fire?”

“Might as well if we don’t come back with what we’re here for.”

“If I am finishing you will find out how to rescue the specimens.”

Tam stood through several more interruptions to Diosa’s safety spiel. Meanwhile, the Brazilian soldiers loaded their luggage and considerable supplies. A crate the size of a refrigerator gave them trouble. Their last delay was while Preston went to check that the lab had everything he had asked for. It did. The space was dominated by a fiberglass tank for a live creature, a chest freezer for a dead one.

Shortly, they cast off. With the the river’s water so calm and Diosa taking her vivid presence up to the wheelhouse, leaving was a non-event. The same sense of movement, of water-sway, that had been underfoot since boarding endured. Tam didn't feel like she'd lost balance, and she never got seasick. But staying stable would always take that bit of extra effort.

Like the others, Tam got herself settled in a cabin. She regretted the spite that had led her to overload on supplies at Occam’s expense. They were all in there with her, now. No air conditioning, and they were supposed to shower on an infrequent roster: she’d expected that. She wasn’t going to enjoy it, though. Her cabin had real windows, not portholes, with mosquito-net curtains. A pity she didn’t trust anyone on here enough to sleep with those windows open.

She changed out of the suit at last. The white wool was boiling her alive. It was in the high eighties, but it felt ten degrees hotter with the thick humidity. Besides, everyone here knew who she’d come with. While she cooled down, she tried three different ways of lying on her built-in single bunk. None of them worked very well. Its mattress length was a tight match for her height. Tam and Preston had been given ‘professor’ cabins, close to the bow, with their own minute bathrooms. The other men had their own cabins, but shared a group bathroom. Tam could hear banging and scuffling as the others arranged their gear. It was close quarters all around.

Finally, Tam emerged to explore, wearing lightweight camo trousers and a blue camp shirt. After the skinny corridor linking the cabins, a meter-wide walkway wrapped each of the two lower decks. The boat’s layout was as Diosa had described it. The first deck was cabins. The second deck held Diosa’s double-sized cabin and Yaní’s bunk, the galley kitchen, and the galley lounge.  This had a central table with two long benches, not fixed in place, but heavy. The wheelhouse was at the very front. Tam avoided the boat’s lowest layer, the hold. The underwater space had supplies and engineering, and the boat’s crammed lab.

By the time Tam had finished a circuit, she returned to the galley lounge. The smell of food cooking had drawn the other Americans there, hungry and restless. Tam smirked. Dinner could start very late in South America. She guessed the _Guilhermino_ ’s galley would be no exception.

One end of the dining room had a shelf of yellowing, humidity-rippled books. Amidst five languages of books about the Amazon, there was fiction. _Three Men and a Boat. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Idle Days on the Yann: A Dunsany Anthology. The General in his Labyrinth. Heart of Darkness._ River stories, one and all. Which one, Tam wondered, would theirs turn out to be? She skimmed the Dunsany until sundown. Then, the boat stilled and anchored, and a clanking bell rang for dinner.

The North Americans took one end of the table; the South Americans, the other. But there was no avoiding sharing the rice, the beans, or the main dish. Yaní ferried out the meal’s centerpiece, two platters. Each held a giant, whole fish, grilled to bronze in its scales, smothered in a lively orange-colored sauce. Tam took a small serving of the fish to be polite, but went back for more. The fish was white and flaky, wonderfully fresh. The sauce added more sweetness and tang.

Hunger and language barriers made for a quiet start to the meal. Then Verdugo said something that set half the table chortling. Tam pricked up her ears as he said _Deus Br_ _â_ _nquia._ Diosa graciously translated. “He says, do you think Deus Brânquia tastes this good?” The American soldiers hooted.

Preston said, “Hell, no. See, he’s probably related to one of two types of fish. Either the periopthalmus, called lungfish or mudskippers, or the coleacanth. The coleacanth is a living fossil, about the same size as a tuna fish. But we don’t eat them like tuna because they’re disgusting. A coleacanth’s flesh is full of oils and fluids for buoyancy, and for its weird nervous system, too.”

Again, Diosa translated. “Science!” Albi exclaimed, in English. The others nodded appreciatively.

Preston just about beamed as he flaked fish with his fork. “This is incredible. Was this caught by the natives today?”

Tam cleared her throat. “Now that we’re actually here, it’s best to call local indigenous groups by their preferred names.”

Preston swung towards her. “It’s just shorthand. We’ve been called gringos seventeen times today. How is that different?”

“It’s different because we don’t belong here.”

“Oh, come on. Does anyone ‘belong’ here? If humans stayed where they belonged, we’d still be on a savanna in Africa.” Preston heard his name and peered around Tam. “Someone got a question?”

Diosa said, slyly, “Verdugo asks if you two are married.”

“No!” they shouted, together. Even Joe and Willie laughed.

“Marriage is not _so_ bad,” Diosa said. “I have been married three times. I get better at it the more I try.”

Tam was getting better at unpicking Portuguese, too. She was fairly certain Verdugo’s next questions were to ask Diosa if she was married now, then if she wanted a husband for the trip. Diosa bantered back calmly. Albi was clenching his sides.

By now, they had destroyed the grilled fish down to their heads and tails. Verdugo reached over and snapped a fish head off.  Again, Diosa bridged the language gap. “He says, caimans eat everything, and so does he.” She turned to Verdugo with another riposte.

Xono held out his hand. “ _Para suerte!_ ”

Verdugo said, with a leer, “ _Para liete!_ ” Together, they cracked and pulled the fish head apart. Each ate a fish eye first. Joe and Willie did the same with the other fish head.

Tam started when Joe cracked his share in half again to offer some to her. “Want this? The cheek right there, that’s the sweet part, eh.”

Tam slid her napkin over her plate. “No, thank you.”

“I’ll take it,” Preston said. “Just dig in with my fingers, huh?”

Tam looked to see how Diosa was handling this on her side of the table. Diosa met Tam’s eyes and looked heavenwards. Tam gave her a little, closed-mouthed smile.

Yaní had never sat down. As she began to collect dishes, Diosa slid a pack of cigarillos from a shirt pocket and lit one. Silently, over the table, she offered the pack to Tam. Tam took a cigarillo herself. Diosa held up her lighter. Tam opened her right hand, palm open, fingers beckoning. When Diosa tossed the lighter across the table, she caught it neatly. Tam took her time grilling the cigarillo’s tip. The moment Yaní lifted the fish platter from her end of the table, she slid the lighter back to Diosa. Tapping the first ash onto her plate, she inhaled. The smoke was rich and hot. 

“ _Gracias_ ,” she said. The table had gone quiet for their exchange.

Diosa gave one nod. “ _De nada._ ” Which it wasn’t. It was either a test she’d passed, or a performance they’d shared. Cleaner than digging into a fish head, just as useful to make it clear they both belonged here.

Preston said, “Do you have to kill yourselves while we’re eating?”

Tam had the cigarillo in her left hand, wreathing Preston in smoke. He had a right to be angry, this once. Tam stood. “Sorry. I’ll take mine outside.”

Escaping was a relief. The stars would have been magnificent, this far from any city sky glow. But an overcast day had darkened fast into a claustrophobic night, velvety dark. They had anchored near the riverbank. Tam listened to the rainforest’s night sounds. Birds? No. Tam recognized those deep barks, interspersed with screams. Monkeys. Ash fell over her fingers as she listened, transfixed.

“Didn’t know you smoked. No nic fits.”

Tam turned. Willie and Joe had followed her onto the deck. Willie had his own lit cigarette in his hand. The small ember carved out his face, shadowed his wiry arm muscles, sheathed in time-blurred tattoos.

“I can take it or leave it,” Tam said. “I’m old enough that we all grew up smoking. But I quit in the ‘80s.”

“Jesus! Nice for some.” As Willie said this, Joe elbowed him. “Just wanna say we liked what you said back there about ‘natives.’ Ain’t no way to talk about ‘em.” Joe nodded heartily.

Tam blinked. “Well. Thank you.”

“Every time I’ve bugged out overseas, when I hear someone talking about ‘natives’ we’re in deep crap. ‘Natives’ are locals who know their shit. ‘Member, Joe, when we were in Iraq, down south, and that asshole Brit colonel went on about ‘natives’? When he meant fuckin’ Shi’ite guerillas.” Joe nodded heartily again. “They’d take you apart, all right. Never underestimate anyone.”

Tam filled her mouth with smoke again, exhaled it. Willie didn’t mind. He leaned close enough on the railing for her to see that they shared the same eye color, the cold zone between gray and light blue. “Not a bad gig this, huh? Don’t got to kill anyone unless they get out of line, if you get me. Instead it’s like a comic book. A supers’ story. Gonna bring back the Swamp Thing!”

Willie looked into the darkness. “Nice and hot here. Like home. I’m a Florida boy, outta Big Cypress. We say it’s where the trailer park meets the ‘Glades. You’re outta Florida too, huh?”

“Sounds like you read my dossier,” Tam said, drily.

“I like you. You don’t miss a trick.” Willie lit a fresh cigarette from the butt of his first one. “I’ll take this to the head. Nothin’ like a smoke and a crap.”

Joe elbowed Willie and gestured eloquently at Tam. Willie smacked his gesture down. “She’s a dyke, she’s one of the guys. Right?”

Joe finally spoke. “Go have your smoke, bro. Out both ends.” He gave Willie a push away with one magazine-sized hand.

Willie hammered down the stairs. Joe folded his musculature in half to take Willie’s place on the railing beside Tam. “Sorry, ma’am. Didn’t know he was going to go off, eh. He’s a good fulla when he’s not being an arse. A good mate. Helped me pull it together in Iraq, one time when...anyways.”

“I hear you,” Tam said. _In more ways than one_ , she thought. Joe's dark, deep-set eyes were always hard to read, but the voice he’d been holding back was its own story. “Can I ask where you’re from?”

“Samoa. Makes me native, too, eh, to fellas like Pres.” American Samoa, he meant. “Grew up in bush like this, always on the water.”  

“Willie, too, with where he’s from in Florida,” Tam mused. That was why this odd couple was minding her and Preston. Men not just trained for swamps and jungles, but born in them. Able to see in them. Hunt in them. She asked one of her safe questions for strangers. “Still have family back there?”

Joe’s smile was diffident, surprisingly sweet. “Aw yeah. This mission, this is one I’ll tell the littlies about. The time we hunted the tanifa.”

“A water spirit...”

“Sort of a water spirit, sort of a shark. This one, Deus Brânquia, killed your old man, eh?”

“Mmmh.”

“That’s what they do! We’ll help you get your own back.” Joe said it as if it was natural that she wanted revenge. “You’ll help us too, eh? You in a good place ‘bout us?”

The good cop and the bad cop, she thought. Willie’s threats and Joe’s confiding. The smoking and the acting out and the undercurrent of damage, eyes that didn’t sparkle. Her brother and her father: Strickland men. “I’ve been here all along.”

“Thank you.” Joe sighed. “Long couple days. Gonna turn in, myself. I’ll pray for you.”

What could she say to that? “Good night.”

When Joe was gone, too, Tam gazed into the darkness. These people wore her out. “Ma’am,” she muttered.

The monkeys howled in reply.

* * *

Wired on nicotine, cramped and hot in her bunk, Tam slept badly. The final touch was piercing clanking at the crack of dawn, right outside her windows. Distrustful, she had slept in her clothes. She slung the lucky bag over her shoulder and went down the hallway to see what was going to be waking her up every morning.

The door opened inwards to bring her face to face with a startled Diosa. “Aaaah!”

Tam leapt back. “Sorry!”

Diosa spoke without thinking, in Spanish. “Careful! This anchor here is sharp.” She was leaning to one side, hauling an edged metal construction in two hands.

“Not a problem,” Tam said, in the same language. “Do you want help with it?”

Diosa said, “This is the front anchor. It lives here, not in front, because the visiting scientists liked to pose there like the movie _Titanic_.” She pointed her chin to an open-topped cage screwed to the wall beside the door.

“Let me take it,” Tam said.

“It is fifteen kilos,” Diosa protested.

“I’ll get it. I’m really strong.” Tam chunked the anchor into its cage easily, its heavy twin blades facing away from the deck.

Diosa smiled wanly. “I have my mother's arms, like noodles. You wish to be second mate? I was not allowed enough crew on this boat. I worry.”

Tam had nothing to do until they came close to Deus Brânquia, and she wasn’t proud of what she’d be doing then. “Sign me up, captain.”

Tam followed Diosa up to the second deck. On the way, Diosa said, “You really do speak Spanish."

“Living in California, I wanted to learn it. To connect with people there. I spoke a little last night. I always need the practice."

“Every American knows _gracias._ Which is very wrong in Brazil. In Portuguese, it's _obrigado_. But Spanish was what we spoke at home, until I was fifteen.” All in Spanish. If this continued, they might be able to have a real conversation.

In the galley lounge, a basic breakfast was set out: puffs of cheese bread, some sliced fruit, milky coffee. Though the bread puffs were hot, there was no sign of Yaní. They took plates and mugs into the wheelhouse. Between bites, Diosa gave Tam a polished overview of the wheelhouse and how to steer. While she glanced frequently at Tam, checking that Tam really did understand her Spanish, she shared without posturing or banter. Last night’s _machisma_ was gone.

Diosa flicked fingers at a dashboard. Half of it was the same older vintage as the rest of the ship. Half of it was new. “Radar, sonar. Preston says we cannot use when we get close: that Deus Brânquia will sense these things. This means no autopilot, when the river will be most difficult. So I need the help, truly. Give the wheel a try.”

Tam couldn’t help being delighted. Taking the wheel was the first agency she’d had in days. The river was easy, here, wide, flat, and glassy. “The water is so black. Is it polluted?”

“No. This water comes to the river from the old jungle. Virgin forest, the trees never cut. The leaves and roots there rot slowly and make the water dark. At the end of the dry season, like now, it is at its most concentrated. But this river is not what it was when our fathers sailed it. On the journey they shared, your father shot one of the river dolphins on the first night. There were many more dolphins, then. It was still terrible bad luck.”

“That is true.”

There was a silence. Finally, Diosa said,  “You are not what I thought you would be like.”

Tam kept her eyes on the water. “What did you expect?”

“I hear that your mother is a lovely blonde. So, some beauty queen they put out like a piece of fish bait. A princess. Not talking to anybody. I never imagined that you would speak my father’s language.” Diosa cleared her throat. “So can I ask you to be better to Preston? You bite at him with your words, all that you say.”

It was a good thing Tam was at the wheel. She could tighten her grip to white knuckles, keep looking ahead, take deep breaths. “Better to Preston.”

“This is not my first voyage like this. Many strangers, all together. We kept my father’s business going after he died. Half of what I do is manage the boat, the other half is manage the people. When people argue at the table, it brings everyone low.”

With the dark river shimmering in her vision, Tam gritted, “Preston blackmailed me into this. Forced me to be here, chasing Deus Brânquia. Did you know that? Or did he tell you we were all a team?”

“All I am told is that he would bring _la hija de Strickland,_ and that we guard you with our lives, for you are the key to finding Deus Brânquia.  You pull too hard to the right, there. Let me.”

Diosa swung the autopilot clamp into place. She leaned in to meet Tam’s eyes. “Many idiots dream of the Amazon. Gringos come to talk to the forest, to save the world in a two week vacation. They drink the indios’ drug, _hoasca_ , for visions of the jungle’s White Lady. I have to make private charter clients prove if they are serious. At least with their money.” Tam laughed, mirthlessly. She would have been one of those idiots in her younger days.

“But in all their crazy talk, gringos do not speak of Deus Brânquia. I did not, either. For Strickland’s hunt for Deus Brânquia finished my father.”

“It killed my father, too.”

“He is dead? When did he die?”

“October 10, 1962. Long ago. Nobody told you?”

Diosa had paled beneath her freckles. “No. Wait while I get something. Two seconds.” Tam barely had time to try and figure out the autopilot’s clamping before Diosa returned. She had a wide, stained leather book in her hand.

“This was the logbook of my father’s expedition for Deus Brânquia.” Reverently, she handed it to Tam. “It is very difficult to read, in Spanish and rambling. My father said Strickland tried to feed it to a vulture. But vultures do not eat books.”

Diosa lit herself another cigarillo while Tam opened it. The paper was yellowing, like the books in the galley lounge. The front page was slanted copperplate handwriting, done with a fountain pen. _El aventura de Raul Romo Zavala Henríquez._ Tam began to wade through it.

At first, the logbook was a combination of efficient data for each day, followed by witty travelogue entries, with sketches. The sketches were not as painstakingly correct as Hoffstetler’s drawings, but they captured the misson’s animals and people with dash and brio. The humor and drawings faded out quickly. Soon, Henríquez and his crew were collapsing with fevers. Eating monkeys. Dreaming of jungle creatures begging them to turn back. Terrified of her father, who was shooting animals and men alike, eternally asking Henríquez, “Are you motivated?” In Henríquez’ story, Strickland was barely called by name: he was always The American.

The last entry was dated a month before her father had reappeared in America, in Baltimore.

 _We found him. We found him. Most of the men_ _–_ _our guides, the Ecuadorian, the Colombian_ _–_ _could not live with their sin. May there be mercy on their souls. Only my withered self, the translator, and the American remain. We three are the ones with families: something to live for beyond the terrible blessing of Deus Br_ _â_ _nquia. So I must believe. For otherwise the American lives yet purely to torture the creature._

Tam could understand this rambling only because she knew what had happened afterwards: her father returning to America, for the brief rest of his life, bringing Deus Brânquia to Occam. She turned the page. A photograph was tucked there: a large, tall man in a white suit and a captain’s hat, with a slim-waisted, long-eyed woman laughing on his knee. He had a flute of champagne in each hand. Diosa's parents. Tam closed it.

Diosa’s cigarillo was down to the stub. “Papa said he ran out of ink for his pens. Truly, I think he blocked much of the voyage home out of his memory. He was never the same. He came back to us a living skeleton, to die five years after, an invalid in a wheelchair. I remember it well, for I was fifteen. I had just had my Communion.”  She took the book back. “We never knew Strickland had died – or Deus Brânquia had escaped.”

“It was on the voyage back they hired Verdugo’s grandfather to help with the creature. My father brought the news back to his family that the creature had killed him. It happened while he was helping transfer the creature to the ship that took him to America.”

“Another one,” Tam marveled.

“That is why Verdugo is with us. To be the mighty hunter, avenging his grandfather.”

“Of our others – Xono wants to be healed. But he never say why, or what he has. The indios say Deus Brânquia used to come to them and heal them. My poor Albondigas is not well inside; maybe a cancer. The hospital, surgery, pain - a man never says he is afraid of that, does he? But he has heard the river stories. And he comes with us instead of going there.”

“What about you?” Tam asked.

“I get the email about this expedition. Then a phone call. A nice lady. New Age Yankees, I think, clever ones to get government money. This came at a good time for me. American dollars, of course. Also my third husband had died. My last brother, too. I make an agreement.”

“It got stranger. I did one thing, they asked for three more. Each thing, more serious. So much money – I find them this boat and they buy it – military people. By the time I am worried...I don’t know how to stop.” Diosa’s seamless, placatory cheer took on a new meaning. Tam nodded, slowly. Offers that sounded wonderful, laced with praise. The realization, slow or quick. The wariness and fear. Herself, here. Her mother Elaine, married to Richard Strickland. 

Diosa shrugged. “I figure it is meant to be. I can try to make it better for Deus Brânquia if we find him, this time. Maybe he helps my crew, maybe not. But I can say to him what my father said as he lay dying. That he was sorry about it all.”

Tam took a step closer. “Joe and Willie – it’s like a movie to them. A comic book, a myth. Light duty, almost a vacation, compared to what they usually do. Unless someone needs to get killed.”

Diosa clenched her hands around the logbook. “I see you talk to them on the deck last night. You are not afraid?”

Tam waved a hand dismissively. “Not of Joe. I’d watch out for Willie more. He’s the real killer of the two. And Preston’s got the most riding on this. Immortality...cures for cancer...you name it, he’ll get it, thanks to Deus Brânquia.”

Diosa shook her head. “Mother of God. Even the scientist.”

“Him most of all.”

There was a moment’s silence before Diosa asked, “And you? Do you want anything from Deus Brânquia?”

Tam said, flatly, “Nothing. Not even revenge for my father.”

“Perhaps that is why they say you will be the one to find him.” Diosa moved away, to the autopilot. After some adjustments, she said, “I hear the men talking. Filthy lies, mostly. But...is it true you’re a lesbian?”

Tam said, “Yes.”

“That gives you a lot to be blackmailed for, in America.”

Tam stayed silent. Diosa went on. “Mama was a _carioca._ We spent much time in Rio. Rio has everyone, every type.” Her way of saying she didn’t care.

It was so tempting to vent to Diosa about all the details. To, maybe, borrow a working cellphone to call Hosna. Tam decided against it. There was too much at stake for her to trust. “All I want is to go home and get my life back. I’m here to do what I have to for that.”

“What if it is cruel?”

Tam thought of the log book, the shot dolphin, the fish on platters. “I’m not my father. Ask Preston what he’s got planned.”

“I will.”

Tam snorted. “Good luck getting him to shut up once you do.”

Diosa slapped her thighs briskly, dashed her hands together, like she was cleaning them. “He should tell me, with what I do for you Americans. This boat could be named the _Jeitinho_ for all the bribes I pay. The permits I get! Land anywhere we want, cut trees, hunt animals, kill a man.”

“Kill a man?”

“Is Deus Brânquia man or animal?  No-one can say. So, I get permits for both,” Diosa said, simply.

Tam stepped back.  

Men’s voices came from the galley lounge behind them. They shifted their conversation back to the river and the boat. Tam got to take the wheel back for a while. Eventually, Diosa went to the galley. Tam heard her out there, talking cheerfully in English, her fear and determination near-invisible once more.

Tam was left with a lot to think about. Her first reflection was as dark as the river. For a boat full of people trying to live, themselves, and to make humanity immortal, they all talked a great deal about killing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _De nada_ = It’s nothing, Spanish.  
>  _Para sorte_ = For luck. Portuguese.  
>  _Para liete_ (pronounced leche) = Portuguese. Literally, ‘milk’ but implies both luck and spunk - as in ejaculate.  
>  Verdugo’s grandfather is in another one of my stories, a lots-of-warnings tale of Strickland wrapping up in Brazil in 1962, [Caipirinha. ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13592679)Spoiler alert: Yes, Verdugo’s grandfather dies in the story, but not at the creature’s hand. Not when Strickland’s the protagonist!  
>  _A carioca_ = Somebody from the city of Rio.  
>  _Jeitinho_ = Little way, a Brazilian prhase for getting things done under the table – workarounds, compromises, bribes, you name it.


	3. Dia dos Finados

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The mission’s pause in an Amazon village brings Tam two kindred spirits who remember Richard Strickland and Deus Brânquia.

_Strickland’s crash is brief and happens but once. He will try to forget it ever happened. When he reaches the city of Bel_ _e_ _m a week later in a_ _Josefina_ _listing forty degrees and half-sunk, he is wearing the translator’s clothes. Knowing too much, the man had to be killed…._

* * *

“Last stop before Deus Brânquia!”

They had been on the river two days. Yesterday, the river had begun to change, splitting into tributaries, blending into islets and swamps. Today, they were pausing at Santa Isabel, the last river town on their journey.

With the boat at the town’s small mooring, Tam watched Albi bustling off, Yani in tow, going for supplies. At the top of the gangplank, she turned, the lucky bag weighing her shoulder. She asked Diosa, “You’re not coming?”

“I am the captain. Preston wishes to test power and generators with his equipment. This is the last chance to fix what is wrong.” She added, lightly, “I will learn more about what he does. Verdugo stays, too.” Diosa’s eyes narrowed as she held back her charming smile. Verdugo remained taken with Diosa. Preston, meanwhile, basked in Diosa’s questions about his work, missing Verdugo’s jealousy.

There was more chemistry happening. Despite not sharing any language, Willie, Joe, and Xono had hit it off. A show-and-tell of their tattoos had broken the ice. They were now a trio, loitering with intent at the bottom of the gangplank. A few locals were eyeing them with interest. Tam strode down, right between them, and said what she’d planned.

“I’m going to find the local church. Guess you’re sticking with me?”

Joe said, “You go to church?”

Willie muttered, to Xono, “ _Iglesia. Catedral._ _”_ Then he yelped, “For real? Come on.”

Tam said, coolly, “As an archaeologist, I’m very interested in architecture. All the details.”  

She and Willie stared each other down. After a moment, Willie gave up, or in. “Fine, whatever. Ain’t like we can lose a six-foot blonde gringo here. Do your thing, we’ll do ours. Meet up here at fifteen, sixteen hunnerd hours.”

“I can do that,” Tam granted.

Willie had to have the last word. “Don’t try any street meat. Or drinks with ice in ‘em.” By time Tam was five meters away, the touts returned. Xono immediately placed himself between the Americans and the Brazilians and began bargaining.

Tam watched them, remembering other, better trips. Shenanigans with a local were the best shenanigans. Over the past two days, she’d gone from being tired of people to having had enough of solitude. She didn’t like the person this forced trip was turning her into. The only time she got to be human was her early-morning chats with Diosa. An afternoon without her was a break for everyone else. Herself, she’d stretch her legs, look for the church. And for a place with cellphones.

Beneath an overcast sky, the town was quiet for a weekday. Almost dead. But Tam carried the lucky bag. The one open place Tam found was covered in cellphone signs. The proprietor took in the lucky bag’s rich gloss and jumped to attention. Again, they did not share a language, but they managed to share ideas. Soon, Tam had a phone, a Brazil number, and a cashed-up calling card. The phone was a cheap brick compared to the sleek Motorola Razr she’d brought from the States. But that had been a gift from her brother. Tam had been flinching when she used it.

The new phone had to charge. Tam was browsing the shop’s other goods when she found it. The candy her father had brought home from Brazil in 1962. Its little boxes were much the same as they’d been forty years ago. The candy hadn’t been for her and her brother: Tam might have forgotten it, if it had been. It had been her father’s stash of sweetness. Tam had sneaked one of those candies, and been caught. It had taught her the hard way that her father had come back from Brazil meaner than ever.

Ever since, Tam had never gone for sweet things, much. Still, defiantly, she grabbed the cardboard flat that held the little green boxes. She bought the lot, throwing in samples of five other candies. Hosna loved food from different places, especially food that had a story. It all vanished into the lucky bag, along with the now-alive phone. So far, so good.

With a spring back in her long stride, Tam was soon at the town’s old Catholic church. It was austere inside and out, its black iron gate hemmed by towering palms. She did a round of the inside for form’s sake. Again, it was austere, high-ceilinged and cool. At the side altar, every possible candle was lit, each someone’s prayer or remembrance. Despite this, nobody was there. Tam considered the pews, but they reminded her of the boat. She went back out.

There was a graveyard behind the church, hemmed by a low wall, shaded by wide, dark trees. Many of the graves had fresh flowers. Halfway down, on the road’s side, a seat was built into the wall. The trees rustled softly. This, Tam decided, would be the place. She sat there and typed in the numbers that would connect her with Hosna.

Hosna picked up on the first ring. Tam said, “Hey, babe. I got you some Brazilian candy.”

“Tamar! Darling.” Hosna’s warm voice paused. “How is the...work there?”

“I’m by myself and talking on a phone they don’t know about. I can tell you what’s really going on.”

Hosna screamed so loudly, Tam had to hold the phone away from her ear, grinning. “ _Ya allah!_ Spill!”

Tam gave her the rundown, all the things she hadn’t mentioned before: their strong-arming her for Hosna’s sake, the cryptid and its history, how her father had died, the ties to her younger years, the bizarre science. She left out the soldiers' implying that she should co-operate, or else, on her own behalf as well as Hosna's.

Hosna finally said, “So you are a hostage and my citizenship is screwed for a mad scientist who thinks he is Troy McClure, the Simpsons fish-lover.”

Tam laughed. “Troy McClure? He’s even got the hair...” She laughed some more, then wiped tears away to wheeze, “I needed that. I can deal with him, now. Everybody here acts like I’ve got an attitude problem for not succumbing to Stockholm Syndrome right away. I miss you so much.”

“I miss you too, habibi. But I do not wish I was there. Falada misses you, too. She keeps looking out the window for you.”

“Oh! My poor puppy.”

“I hope it’s for you. What you say about me and immigration is a great worry. I think the house is being watched. There is a black SUV that was not there before, on our street.”

Tam’s throat went dry. “You’re sure they didn’t get another bloatmobile next door?” Their neighbour, a one-hit musician, liked flashy cars.

“It gives me a bad feeling. With what you say…first, I will call a lawyer. For me, this time. And then maybe Tim. Mister FBI CSI Guy is always boring us with ‘when I was a field agent’. For once, he may be useful.”

“We’re not talking to him, remember? He’s having a goddamned affair with our stepsister. My sister, damn it.” Tam stood up.

Hosna said, firmly, “It turns out that it is legal. Does that change it for you at all?” Tam was bitterly silent. “Why is it still wrong?”

“Sarah’s such a pushover.”

“She stood up to you on the phone to defend him. That is how we found out about this.”

“Tim’s always been a perv. A heartless user.”  

“With this, he says he is in love. He says it more times in one call than he did at his wedding.”

“He’s chronically depressed. He should sort that out before any ‘relationship’.”

“If Americans waited until they were not depressed to get involved most of the country would be single.”

Tam cracked. “It’s just gross!”  

Hosna trilled, “The real problem! It is very like Tim to even fall in love a way that makes us go ‘ugh,’ is it not?” Tam did not laugh. Hosna continued. “Perhaps she is over him, and it has stopped. I can’t find out unless we talk.”

“You don’t have to. I’m doing everything I can. Going along with...Troy McClure and all that. We don’t need a lawyer right now. Let me handle it from here, okay? Trust me, I’ve got this.” It was Hosna’s turn to be silent. “I’m talking to you now, aren’t I?”

“True,” Hosna admitted. “How are you? Are you out to all, and is it all right or a problem?"

“Yeah. None of these people are stupid. It could be worse. There’s one equal-opportunity asshole,” Tam meant Willie, “and a chronic machismo case.” Verdugo. He had gone, with Tam, from oily smiles to icy glares. “But there’s a language barrier, so they’re not palling up. Other than that, they’re handling me with kid gloves. Preston flat-out called me an ‘asset’ yesterday.”

“Like a piece of equipment!” Hosna declared.

“We’ll be in touch as long as we’ve got reception here. But let me call you. I don’t want this phone taken off me if it rings.”

Hosna sighed. “I wish I could argue with that. I cannot. Call me again soon.”

“I promise, darling. Tomorrow. I love you.”

Tam hung up and swayed back to the bench, going limp. Surveillance. She reached into the lucky bag at her feet, took Hosna’s photo from her wallet. Hosna’s strong features had always bypassed mere prettiness for timeless beauty. She’d barely changed since the day they’d met. Tam had sworn that she wouldn’t just get Hosna out of Syria, she’d give her the good life. The American dream. Not this nightmare. Surveillance! Back on the boat, Tam was going to be faking Stockholm Syndrome. Which would lead to the real thing, soon enough.

Replacing the photo, Tam felt that the small candy boxes had escaped their flat container. Tam decided to try one. The green, flattish disk had a glassy quality. Tam took it on her tongue and grimaced. What had been delicious when she was a girl tasted insanely artificial now. How was it possible to get anything that acid-sweet? No wonder her father’s breath had been so awful. Tam felt chilled to remember it - no, it wasn't that. A cold breeze was cutting the midday humidity.

The artificial taste in her mouth intensified. Before she could identify the flavor, someone said, clearly: _Caghino._

Tam jerked up to stare around. Nobody was on the dusty red road, on either side.

The next call was practically in her ear. _Ol_ _á ol_ _á ol_ _á._

Tam turned. A green parrot with a yellow nape was perched on the wall behind her. Having gained Tam’s attention, the small parrot bobbed its head _. Je se Ovinho. Je m_ _’appelle Ovinho. Soy el mas guapo, Ovinho!_ It opened its wings.

Tam was half-laughing, now. “Hi, Ovinho. I’m Tam. Can you say Tam? Tammy?”

The parrot tilted its head and shuffled. Instead of her name, it declared, _vai tomar no cu!_

“I must apologize. That wicked bird will speak to anyone who has food. But I cannot vouch for what he says!” Tam turned to the wall behind her. On the other side, in the graveyard, was a tall, gangling man. He was dapper in beige linen and ivory cotton. His immaculate Panama hat sheltered a long, tragicomic face, dominated by a serious nose over his silver moustache. He spoke English with an unplaceable, cosmopolitan accent.

The little parrot flew to his shoulder, chirping in delight. “Tammy: I remember that name. American, no? Is it possible that you are the daughter of Richard Strickland?”

Tam stood back up. “Yes!”

The man smiled sadly. “I was the translator on his journey here.”

“You must have been so young,” Tam said. If he’d been twenty then, he’d be in his mid-sixties now. From his sad, hooded eyes, that seemed about right. “How did you become a translator?”

“My family fled the war in Europe for Manaus, the city downriver.” World War II, probably. “Manaus has its free trade zone. I learned the local languages, traveled for us. The more I went and learned, the more I fell in love. With the rivers, these forests, the people here. It is a unique way of life, here in Amazonas. Everything changes, with the great floods each year, but nothing does.”

“Wow. You - can I get you a cup of coffee somewhere—”  Tam paused, remembering Henriquez’ logbook. “From what I’ve heard, it’s the least I can do after your trip with my father.”

He chuckled drily. “I must admit, your father was very difficult. How do you say it in English: the death of me! Let me stay here in peace. But I will talk to you a while here. If you know of Strickland’s journey, you must also know of Deus Brânquia.”

This man was full of surprises. Or he didn’t give a fuck. Both were appealing. Tam said, “I do. But we were very young, ourselves, then. He told us nothing.”

“That is well, for the very young.”

“You…would have helped with Deus Brânquia?”

This time, the translator’s smile radiated joy. “How good to be remembered for that! He was very ugly. Such an ugly one. But, then, I am, too. So we got along well.”

Before Tam could protest, the translator continued. “Truly, I did not see Deus Brânquia so much as, in his presence, I became aware of the world as he sees it.  I would look at him, see the scales and his great eyes, then…the time...the love...it is beyond words.” The translator shook his head, still bemused at the memory. Ovinho uttered a trill of amazing beauty.

Tam thought about how enchanting it was when her dog was especially affectionate. “It can be that way, with a really special animal.”

The translator gave his mouth a wry twist. “Your father, as I said, was difficult. On a boat, with close quarters and travel, when there is disagreement, conflict becomes inevitable. After your father and I argued a final time, I remained here. While he went on, downriver.”

Ovinho chose this somber moment to say, _Filho de puta!_

They both laughed. “You’re not going upriver yourself, I hope. This is as far as most visitors come. Downriver, towards Manaus, is an enchanting journey. You’ll see all the animals, the old forest, the _indios_ who have chosen to come out and talk to us. But you will also have peace and comfort. There is little of either, upriver.”

Tam hedged. “I’m here…more for work.”

The translator said, “So your father said, each day. But the rivers of Amazonas run slow. Enjoy Santa Isabel, at least. There is a place in town with excellent drinks. Mama Linda’s. Down this road, towards the river, beneath the last tree.”

 Tam could take a hint. “I’ll check it out now. Thank you. _Obrigado._ Did I say that right?”

“You said it perfectly.” The translator pulled his hatbrim down a touch, eyes vanishing in its shadow. Ovinho took refuge between the hatbrim and his thick silver curls. “ _Adeus._ Blessed is the God of our fathers. But Deus Brânquia is merciful.”

What a strange thing to say. By the time Tam had decided to turn back and ask him what he meant, he was gone. Where he had been standing, Tam could now see an unusual gravestone. It was heaped halfway up its height with green orchids. Its marble had a half-eroded bird carved on the top, spreading its wings like the small parrot had.

A few heavy raindrops spattered the road. From three days in the region, Tam knew it would turn into a downpour shortly. The place she’d been sent promised shelter. She loped down the road, missing her dog, the two of them running together. The last tree, as promised, had a ramshackle building, close enough to the river that it was on stilts. Tam made it up and onto a covered porch right as the skies opened. Another cold breeze ruffled her as the rain came down. 

Mama Linda’s was a dive. Rough plank walls were pinned with faded postcards, incomprehensible posters, and animal hides. A few blue-painted stools were scattered around a battered pool table. It was empty, but that could change any moment. At the back, the bar’s service window was open.

Tam felt a pull on the lucky bag. She looked down at a long-nosed, furry face. A coatimundi, the Amazon version of a raccoon, was tugging a corner of the bag. It whiffled and squeaked, paddling its hand-paws on Tam’s knee.

“Aren’t you the – hey. No. No, no.” The determined coati could smell the candy. It was trying to scale Tam’s leg.

Somebody clapped sharply and screamed, “Ai!” The coati scampered. Tam turned to see who had rescued her. “Shoo, shoo, shoo! Very bad one, him!” A woman’s voice, understandable for all her heavy accent. “He will let anyone who feeds him do what they want. But you must feed him first. Very sorry.”

“No problem,” Tam replied. “I am good with animals.”

Tam was immediately charmed. The woman behind the bar was, she thought, what Hosna might age into, though this woman's face was round and flat, like a golden moon, lined with a lifetime of good humor. She had silver hair with dark streaks in a topknot that kept falling over, pinned front and back with hibiscus flowers.

She asked, hopefully, “You are here for the drinks? Not a soul today, I have bored. _Dia dos Finados._ All at church in the morning, no-one until night.”

“I saw the cemetery. There were many flowers.”

“Ah! Did you see the stone de _Sehnor Papagio?_ The man who die on the river, his throat,” her eyes widened, “cut by the bad man of the forest – _el corta cabeza!_ ”

She leaned on the counter, companionably. “The dead man had a tame parrot. The bird cried and cried as they made his grave, then sit on his stone. Five years, the parrot is, it does not go. When the bird die, they put it with the man. That night, the White Lady, sad phantom, came from the forest to the stone. She leaves a green flower there. The priest, himself, saw.”

“I saw the grave, but I didn’t know what it was.” The rain was hammering down. Tam took a seat. An hour with this character would be something to share with Hosna. “ _Sehnora,_ are you Mama Linda?”

“Yes. Two good things to visit here. _Sehnor Papagio_ and Mama Linda,” she said, proudly. “For many years, I am prettiest woman here.”

“You still are,” Tam said.

Mama Linda laughed so hard, one of her hibiscus flowers fell away. “For that, I make you a drink. My special. Best on the river.” The coati popped up on her side of the bar as she busied herself with sugar and limes. Tam watched with interest. At fifty-three, this was how she liked to drink: one or two cocktails in the afternoon, while connecting with someone interesting.  

While Mama Linda was easing a liquor bottle down from a top shelf, Tam said, “A man who knew my father sent me here. He was…” Tam paused. Not like her, to not get the man’s name.

Mama Linda eyed Tam’s blonde hair with interest. “What was your father? Argentinian? German?”

“North American.” After the translator, Tam threw it out there. “Richard Strickland.”

She shook her head. “Strickland! I remember him well.” Mama Linda slid the tumbler over to Tam. “This was his favorite. The caipirinha.”

Tam sipped. It was like the green candies had grown up and gone to heaven. The palest gold cachaça liquor, limes at their tropical best, sugar to temper the acid and bite, chilled with crushed ice. It went down like one of those occasional cool breezes.

“It’s…awesome. Did my father come here?”

“No, no. I meet him in a different bar. Belem City.”  She smiled. “Where I was a dancer.”

Tam spat out her second mouthful of caipirinha.

She’d known her father picked up women overseas. Her mother had admitted as much: even said, with some pride, he never did it in the States, unlike other husbands at the time. That was a lie, though her poor mother hadn’t known that.

Tam remembered finding a box of her father’s effects, his desk contents from Occam. They’d included photos of another woman: security camera shots of Elisa Esposito. A lot of them. The presence of the well-thumbed photos made it even uglier that her father had shot Elisa. Tim had been there too. He had declared he had _no idea why_ the pictures were there, _they_ _’d never know_ , while seeping guilty understanding. It had all happened in front of their stepsister, so Tam had let the lies stand. She’d made Tim send the photos back to Giles Dupont. Having done the right thing, she’d forgotten about them. Until now.

As Tam recovered, Mama Linda said, matter-of-factly, “He was a terrible man. But it is thanks to him I received the blessing of Deus Brânquia. I returned here, to my home, and started this bar.”

Tam inhaled. “Did you say Deus Brânquia?”

Mama Linda clapped her hands. “This is another story! From when I was very worst bar girl in all Belem. Very young, very shy, terrible dancer. Your father, he say he and the man he with come downriver after they hunt. We think, rich gringo, money to hire the guide man and to celebrate, too. Your father was quiet. He stared and stared, like he still hunted. I say myself that maybe when we,” Mama Linda paused, delicately, “dance, I can steal his wallet. After drinks, they say they will show us what they hunt. They cannot stop talking about it. So three of us, we go with them to a boat…”

Mama Linda had polished her tale of this ill-fated pickup into a comic bar story. Tam couldn’t decide if it was pathetic or a masterwork of survival. She was fascinated, aghast, well aware she was disassociating from the story by analysing it when Mama Linda breathed, “In the hold, just the two of us, that is when I see him. Deus Brânquia. The gill god of the river. Truly! In water in the bottom of boat, he is locked up with chains.”

“What was he like?”

“Ai ai ai!” Mama Linda splashed more cachaça and another ice cube into Tam’s glass for this. “So beautiful. So beautiful I cannot say. His funny face, when he peek up from the water! So cute. Then, he stand, I see all of him. Oh, my! Big eyes, big yellow eyes, and his smell.” Mama Linda closed her eyes and inhaled with gusto.

“He cry out to me, then he look into my eyes. To see me. I see him and I know I am very small. Maybe to him I am a butterfly. A little one, wishing to fly home. When he go like this,” Mama Linda blinked widely, “I know Deus Brânquia know my wish. He was strong, like a river fish. They grow meters long, here. It is easy for them to eat a butterfly – or a monkey.” Tam blinked.

“With that Deus Brânquia break the chains!” Mama Linda spread her arms, exuberantly.

“His hand is on me, once, like he touch the foot of a saint. Then he pull your father into the water, splosh! I feel like a deer. I go, fast. Down the docks, away, to small boats that go upriver. By morning, gone. Since the day, I have _bueno liete_.” Mama Linda raised a finger, eyes wide. “And your father kept his wallet!”

Tam had to laugh.

“People ask, what next? Did he eat the gringo? Or did the gringo kill Deus Brânquia, maybe take him away? I let them say to me. Those who love Brazil say, of course he eat. Others say the gringo must have killed our gill god and that is why things are bad now. You are his child. Maybe you know how better anyone.” Mama Linda’s eyes twinkled. “But do not tell.”

“I thought I knew. But it turned out I didn’t,” Tam said.

“Nobody believes. Never, never, not once. But I swear on the altar of the church it is true.”

The rain had stopped, as abruptly as it began. Tam checked the time on her phone. “I need to go, I’m afraid.”

Mama Linda’s expressive face fell. “Oh, no. No, no. You come back? Tonight? Music, dance, _carne asada_. Nobody steal your wallet, I promise.”

Tam said, firmly, “We really do have to go.”

Mama Linda shrugged and took Tam’s glass back. She plucked the lime out of it and tossed it to the coati. Casually, she said, “This feeling, I know. Remember, above all. Deus Brânquia is merciful.” 

At the top of the stairs, Tam turned back. Between cachaça and stories, she’d forgotten to pay. But Mama Linda had left her post after placing something on the bar. Tam left money beside it. She was glad Mama Linda had waited to put this piece of atmosphere out. It was a demented piece of taxidermy, a badly stuffed coatimundi. Probably rife with insects. Tam left, fast.

It had been an ideal traveler’s afternoon, for all that she’d probably been sucked into the two local tourist traps. In a place so remote, that was still an adventure. Tam resolved to keep the people she’d met to herself. The translator had been gracious, under the circumstances. Tam understood his reserve. And Mama Linda had had that sordid encounter with her father. She was probably the only person on the whole planet to have a sense of humor about Richard Strickland. Tam never had.

She felt these conversations would give her an edge when – if, Tam reminded herself – they found Deus Branquia. He was a magnificent beast, magnified by local folklore. Wildly strong, by the sound of it, but tameable. At his best with people who were good with animals. Like her. Interesting how both the people she’d talked to yearned for him.

Tam checked her new phone before getting in sight of the river’s edge. Between Mama Linda’s and here, its puny charge had died. This, too, was still a small success. She felt up to trying a fresh start on the boat.

She arrived at the boat's gangplank at same time as Willie, Joe, and Xono. Xono drifted lightly up the boards, his eyes slicing across Tam, glinting sharply. Willie and Joe were slower, each carrying a flat of canned drinks. Willie stopped Joe before he went up. “You gonna hurl again? Let’s chill here for – ” He saw Tam.

Tension descended. The two men, staring like they’d never seen her before, both had reddened whites to their eyes. Tam would’ve thought they’d found the local weed, but they weren’t happy or relaxed. Instead, their intense gazes gave her a chill. Tam remembered Mama Linda’s words about her father. _He stares and stares, like he still hunts_.

Willie said to Joe, “Damn.” He strode up to Tam. “All right. What are you hiding?”

Tam’s ribs went slick with extra sweat. “I did what I said I would. Checked out the church.” The man’s wide-eyed gaze did not waver. What had set him off, so immediately? Tam threw in, “I had a drink afterwards. Since we can’t, on board.”

“Get me to the church on time!” Willie laughed, a little wild. He turned back to Joe. “I could see it. I could see she’d been up to some shit.”

Joe said, “Xono hooked us up with jungle nicotine. Buchité.” He swayed, still staring at and, somehow, through Tam. “They said this stuff’ll have us seeing Deus Brânquia.”

“Shut it down! Fuck,” Willie said, twitching. “His first round didn’t work. So he tried another. It’s like he said, like too much nicotine.”

Both men stepped back, reading Tam’s disbelief the moment she thought, _more like_ _jungle amphetamine_. They were so wired they were picking up on tiny bits of body language, the eye-shifts that gave her true feelings away. Fortunately, Tam had more than one thing she shouldn’t under her belt. And talking to Hosna had made her genuinely, deeply motivated. Tam drew the lucky bag against her a bit more.

“Did Joe maybe have,” Tam said, “a drink with ice in it along the way? Might be good to lie down for a while. If you’re lucky, these stomach bugs go fast.”

Willie shifted his jaw from side to side, a considering predator.

“We’re all in this together,” Tam said. _Like it or not_ , she thought.

Joe began to say, “She means it – ”

“For the first fuckin’ time.”  Willie stepped aside from the gangplank, gestured Tam up it.

Tam went back onto the boat, stomach sinking with realization. That drink really was something she shouldn’t have had. Because, distracted, charmed, _she_ _’d_ had a drink with ice in it. She hoped that the liquor had killed any bugs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Dia de Finados_ = Brazilian Portuguese: The Day of the Dead. A more somber holiday in Brazil than it is in other areas of Central and South America.  
>  Ovinho's a dirty bird! His various curses translate roughly as "little shitter," "fuck an entire ass," and "son of a whore."  
>  _Adeus_ = Brazilian Portuguese: A goodbye that implies "Farewell forever."
> 
> The events behind Mama Linda's story are told from Strickland's perspective in another story of mine, [Caipirinha](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13592679). Major warnings & explicit adult content in this Strickland character study/filth.


	4. The Broken Door

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tam’s down with a stomach bug, quarantined in her bunk. So it all comes to her, naturally. The crew’s tensions and passions as they approach Deus Brânquia. A dark vision of her father. Bloody murder.
> 
> Warnings increase for this chapter!

_In the dreams, he’s back on the_ _Josefina_ _, skating beneath cutlasses of fog, the blood of the crew drooling from the deck, the only sound the slavering suck of toothless mud…_

* * *

Liquor, Tam reflected, had not killed the bugs.

Tam's illness began after the most pleasant dinner they’d had so far. There was a celebratory mood at really getting on their way.  Even Tam felt lighter after her day’s successes and secrets. To her, heading for unbroken wilderness was a step closer to it being over. At the meal, she exerted herself to show she was, so to speak, on board. Diosa encouraged Tam’s Stockholm Syndrome by hanging on her every word. Preston was quiet, for once. Willie and Xono exchanged dilated bad-boy glances. Everyone was solicitous about Joe, who was skipping the meal.

Tam had even offered to help Yaní bring dishes through to the galley. Yaní, astonished that her cook’s invisibility field was malfunctioning, had been hemming and hawing over this. Tam was noticing that Yaní's eyes, while small and old, were a startling hot amber, when the stomach bug hit. Hard. She had heaved herself outside in time to vomit over the boat’s side. At least this supported her white lie, shared with Willie, that Joe had a stomach bug himself.

That was the night when Tam learned the monkeys’ cries died down around midnight. When they fell quiet, Tam dared to open her window for a while. She decided the boat, the _Guilhermino_ , was quietly alive. It was more pleasant than she’d expected, like the boat was watching out for her. Water splashed the sides softly. There were occasional bumps on the hull below. Every person telegraphed their location in sound. At one point, Tam heard someone in the hallway, a man as quiet as a hunter. Shortly after, there were two sets of footsteps overhead. Diosa’s cabin was above. Tam guessed Verdugo had made progress with Diosa.

Tam was still awake at dawn, gray and drained. Her entire gut was tender. Her forehead was hot: a bad sign. She was perishing for a full shower, but waiting until she really needed it. To compensate, she had brushed her teeth three times. Through her window, Diosa’s light tread tapped down the stairs, onto the deck. Tam went out to help Diosa with the anchors. The boat was far less steady underfoot, today.

For the second time, Tam opened the hallway’s door on a startled Diosa. “No, no, no. Back to bed. I bring this for you.” Diosa’s hands were full. She thrust a mug of tea at Tam. “Tea of the herbs, like my mama made for me.” Inside the mug’s liquid, dark leaves swirled like rags.

Tam took a sip. “Tastes healthy,” she managed.

“Also, biscuits. You like some rice? A banana? No? Then you get this,” Diosa said, heaving up a plastic box as long as her thigh.

“No pharmacy out here, so I bring one. For you, some Panadol for fever, and Aquatabs so this do not happen again.” She shooed Tam down the narrow hallway to Tam's cabin at the end, then came in. There was room for Diosa to stand if Tam gave in and got back into her bunk.

“You look like the dead. Do you sleep at all?”  When Tam admitted she hadn’t, Diosa said, “I do not sleep much, either. Strange dreams. And also I worry if someone else goes sick. Mama always said, never two without a third.”

Tam took all the pills and put them beside the tea mug and the plate of starch. “ _Obrigada_.”

Diosa smiled. “Between you and me: _gracias_.”

“You're good at this. Do you have children?”

“No children. I had three husbands, which is the same thing.” Tam made an amused noise, but stopped when Diosa added, “They all died on these rivers. Dengue fever: drowning: a new bacteria that eats the body, the flesh. Preston was interested in that one.”

Typical Preston. Tam asked, “Surviving Preston okay?”

“He will be lucky to survive me by the time I am through asking the questions.” Diosa shifted the one step it took to put her in the doorway. “Promise you will stay in here while you are sick. These stomach illnesses, on a boat…”

“I understand. Completely,” Tam said. She slid her feet back under the one sheet she could tolerate in the heat and humidity. As Diosa closed the door, she sipped more of the tea. It cut through the vile film in her mouth better than toothpaste did. Tam was then amused by eavesdropping on Diosa waking Joe with another mug of tea-made-from-herbs. He sounded crisper, this morning, and was up for a real breakfast. Breakfast. Hm. Tam ate two of the ships’ biscuits Diosa had brought.

Her body was having none of that.  An hour and a half later, Tam had just finished doubling over, sick again. She was grateful for the fifth time that she had a bathroom of her own. Before she raised her head to spit and flush, she heard voices – from below. The floor was thin, and directly over the lab in the hold. Tam leaned closer to listen more.

Down there, Diosa was pleading. “Can you catch and release? Get the samples and let go? Maybe with radio collar like we do with our jaguars.” Tam inhaled.

Preston could be very patient if he was the center of attention. Tam had never heard him shout. “Deus Brânquia isn’t a species, he’s a singular asset. Unique.”

“Some who see say he has a wife,” said Diosa. Preston laughed. “A mate, somebody with him!” Tam's queasiness returned.

“Something from another species? That's kind of tragic. If that’s the case for real, it’s best to bring him back to civilization. More likely it’s folklore. Tam’s the humanities side of our team. She says myths like that get updated based on what natives need to believe at the time.” Tam glared daggers at the floor. What a time to get credit.

Preston went on with uplifting finality. “You do your job and we do ours. With our eyes on the prize; health and immortality.”

Diosa cried, “For who? Us people in Brazil, where Deus Brânquia comes from? Your generals in America? Or for the rich who can pay your price?”

Preston had no reply to that.

Diosa said, woeful, “From Deus Brânquia, you will make new gods. But I think they will look more like you than like me.”

Someone knocked on Tam's cabin door. “Hey! Ya decent in there?”

Tam tore herself away. She opened up to be startled by Joe and Willie.

Joe filled the small doorway. “Sorry you're crook. Try this, maybe." He offered one of the drinks he’d bought yesterday, a can of coconut juice. He seemed to be back to his usual restrained self, though he was wearing sunglasses indoors.

Willie peeked around Joe like a rat. “Don’t drink it! Tastes like goddamn bees!”  He punched Joe's side. “Coconuts from a coconut. The hell kind of drink is that for an American? They’re gonna take his passport back. Can’t believe I couldn’t buy a Coke in that hole yesterday, had to stock up on grape soda.”

Tam glared at Willie. “Passport?”

Joe said, "Aw. I first joined up way back to get citizenship. Not citizens automatically in Samoa, eh. It’s a territory, not a state.”

Tam sat down on her bunk, hard. With that behind him, Joe had watched her get strong-armed around Hosna's immigration status. She wished she could go back to two nights ago and take the fish head Joe had offered then.

Here and now, Tam popped the drink open to take a solid mouthful. Unchilled, it did taste like bees. Bees and cardboard. But once it hit the back of her throat, it slid down easily. “It’s really good. Thank you.”

"Thanks f'r covering, yesterday."

"Shit happens," Tam said.

Willie howled. “With _tourista_ like you've got, I'll say. Get better, we got a Swamp Thing to catch.” Tam tightened, even as Joe smiled that diffident smile. He shut her door, softly, a big man being careful in a small world. A world whose restrictions were tight around them both.

When they were gone, Tam was nearly dizzy, between Diosa and Preston arguing and Joe's revelation. She went through each fact and what it might mean for her. For all that it was interesting, it changed nothing – no, perhaps one thing. Tam might be left alone for a while.

Talking this out with Hosna would be ideal. Tam drew the lucky bag from under her pillow, extracted her local cellphone. Hosna wasn’t picking up. Tam tried to send a text on the out-of-date phone. Five minutes later, she gave up, with the start of a headache.

Tam forced down more coconut water. Damn Willie. She was losing patience with his goading. She was also craving a Coke, when she hadn’t drunk soda in years. For a while, she pictured how to bring Willie’s jerkwad static into line. Delivering an arm-wrench that caught nerves and a hard word in his ear was tempting. When Tam had been younger, she hadn’t believed in violence. Then, she’d come out. It turned out violence believed in her. In more ways than one: her first self-defense class had been a revelation. Tam let the idea go. If her family hadn’t left Florida for Baltimore maybe her brother Tim would’ve wound up like that.

Tim…

Seeing if he had anything useful was the one thing she could try for Hosna from here. 

Tam allowed herself five minutes of revivifying fury and coconut juice. Then she picked up the phone to finally call her brother. Each call needed the calling card number, international codes, the number itself. For all that, she got Tim's voicemail. Maybe. 

 _Tim Strickland, if you_ _’re talking to me you_ _’ve got problems_ _–_ His weary voice was cut off prematurely by static.

Tam said, roughly, “It’s Tam. Problems? This once I do. I’ve been kind of…harsh, but the time is right. Let’s talk. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. Bye.”

Tam waited another hour, wary that someone might have heard her making calls. She tried reading, more of the Dunsany, but it struck her as gloomy. _None may ask questions in this gate for fear they wake the people of the city. For when the people of this city wake the gods will die. And when the gods die men may dream no more._ She tucked it aside and tried to find, listening, the boat-sounds she'd heard last night.

Outside, the morning chorus of birds died down for monkey calls. There went her hope of some sleep in the afternoon. They were howler monkeys, the Amazon’s largest primates. Right now, at the end of the dry season, they took their territorial battles down to the rivers.  Their deep, booming howls were punctuated with irregular shrieks. Tam had learned about them from one of the warped books in the galley. It had been unpleasant to recognize, in a drawing of a monkey’s aggression display, her strangest childhood memory.

After a set of primate shrieks that bored right through her brain, she redialled Tim.

 _Tim Strickland, if_ _–_ hideous, nausea-inducing static. “Tim? It’s your sister. You’ve got a voicemail thing there, need to fix it. I’ll call again.” The phone felt very heavy, like a small lead ingot. Tam put it down.

When someone banged her door, she jumped. “Hi there! Open up, it’s Preston.”

Tam undid the door’s latch, which seemed to have shrunk and grown slippery, and swayed back onto her mattress. “Gosh, you really are sick. I brought you one of my sports drinks. From my personal stash. It’s got lots of potassium.”

The drink was so blue it almost glowed. Unlike anything else she’d been offered, it was cold. Tam tried a mouthful. “I can taste the minerals.” She rolled the bottle against one of her wrists, letting it cool her pulse.

“Great, isn’t it!” Without asking, Preston pulled up a piece of Tam’s baggage and sat on it.

“Sorry if all this has been stressful. It’s been tough all ‘round. Lots of pressure. Team central is all, aren’t you there yet.” Tam saw bluish hollows under Preston’s eyes, his chin raw with stubble. “Uh…about the plan…I was thinking…”

Ugh, that plan: the maddening way they were going to lure and trap Deus Brânquia. Tam braced herself.

Preston said, “The outfit that they came up with for the, ah, on-site procedure. The color blue _is_ one of the creature’s positive associations. But that outfit, it's not really you. I mean, I wouldn’t want to wear it. Nobody’ll know if we go off program out here, am I right? So, first few times we give it a try, how about you wear blue clothing. But your own things.  Like that shirt from the other day.”

Was she actually having this conversation? “Thanks. That helps.”

Preston leaned forwards. “Everyone wants this to succeed. For that, we need you on board a hundred percent. A hundred and ten, if you’ve got it.”

Preston stood up. “I know we didn’t get off to the best start. But you understand what’s at stake, here. Like, when you’re talking to people about a statue a museum wants, you make them understand it’s best off in the museum. Don’t you? Removing the creature from risk is going to be the best way to keep him alive. Plus, let’s face it. Brazil doesn’t have the resources to develop his full potential. Not without outside investment. Probably from China. Would China be any better than we are – any more ethical? Negative.”

As Preston chattered, he paced the three steps the cabin allowed, forwards and back, shoulders hunched. Like a restless monkey. Tam realized, suddenly, the bumping she’d heard below last night must have been him. Another sleepless soul.

He stopped short. “Am I the only one tired of calling it Deus Brânquia? It fosters all kinds of…I dunno, anthropomorphization.”

Tam could get a word in edgewise at last. “Do you have anything better?”

“Not yet. But – ” Preston smiled, with the same fixed quality as when he’d first met Tam. “I will. You need anything else in here?”

Finally, he was gone. Tam had not imagined that she could feel so fried after a day and a night in bed. She held out her left arm. It remained well-turned with muscle, despite five days of travel and inactivity. She gave herself two more weeks before she really lost fitness. Then, she pinched one hand. The skin took a moment to recover. Dehydration. She levered herself up to drink an awful beverage, picking one at random. It was real work. She needed to call Hosna for the day while she was still conscious. She lay down, turning her back to the door. It took her three tries to get the complicated sequence of numbers right.

“Hello?” Hosna’s voice was clipped.

“Hey, babe. It’s me. Tam. I’m -”

Hosna cut her off. “Somebody killed my cats.”

“What?”

“I came home and all the cats were dead.” Hosna's voice was hoarse from holding back tears.

Tam’s throat tightened. “Was it Falada?” She could see it, blood all over the pale house, the pale dog.

“No. She has been with me – I walked her – we came back and all three were dead. _Laid out on the dining room table._ ”

“Fuck,” Tam breathed. “Is anything else touched?”

“I have no idea. I trust nothing. Once I put their bodies in the freezer and pack, I’m leaving.”

“Babe, what – maybe that’s not bad – who are you staying with? Jumana? Jenny? Dina?”

“I cannot take this to another Syrian,” Hosna hissed. “I cannot let this take them. I’m going. Falada! Come!”

“Darling, don’t take Falada. Put her in the kennels. Traveling with her is like traveling with a unicorn, everyone notices you.” There was noise in the hallway. Tam dropped her voice. “I have to call you back.”

“I will text.”

“Let me know where you’re -” Before Tam finished, Hosna was gone. Was going. Tam didn’t know where.

Tam coiled her fists in the sheets and turned her face to the pillow, whispering: _fuck, fuck, fuck_. Her fever shifted suddenly to chills. She braced herself for a knock on her door. But it did not come. Tam punched the wall. _Fuck. Come bother me so I can call her back_ , her mind shrieked. She had the energy she’d missed before to sit up and listen yet again.

Diosa and Verdugo were in the hallway, speaking rapid-fire Portuguese. Tam caught the slam of a body falling against a door. The silence that followed hummed with meaning, ripe and hot. It was broken by a playful slap. _“Vai!_ _”_ Diosa ordered. A little sharper-sounding than the Spanish. It probably meant the same thing, _Go_ , because Verdugo was striding off.

There was the knock on her own door. “It’s not locked,” Tam said.

“Very good,” Diosa said, easing in. She carried a bottle of water and more tea, balanced on top of the pharmacy box. “You want to eat some dinner?”

Tam pointed to the crackers. “I couldn’t keep those down. Inside me,” she added, to Diosa’s confused look.

“We will miss you at the table.”

Tam was beyond niceties. “I thought I argued too much.”

“You kept the table civilized. Preston...” Diosa frowned, fell silent. “All these men on board, showing the muscles, so much talk. The soldiers and the hunters play-fight upstairs all day. Nice to look at, but none of them wake up in the morning.”

Tam cleared her throat. “You and Verdugo?” She rolled a hand, raised her eyebrows.

Diosa glowed guiltily. “I ought wait. Until job is done. Many reasons to say no. Many others to say yes.” Diosa opened the pharmacy box. When Tam said nothing, she chirped, “Now you know I am silly. Take your temperature?”

Tam submitted to a moment with a thermometer in her mouth. When it was silencing her, Diosa added, "Nobody is married on this boat."

As the thermometer came out, Tam said, "I am. Well, I feel like I am. Twenty-two years." It didn't feel that long. Not that she and Hosna could get married in California.

This threw Diosa. "You...oh...women like being married, so two women...yes."

Tam backed off, disappointed at the way Diosa's face had fallen. “Women are the ones who get things done.”

“That is why they say you are the one to find Deus Brânquia. But for now you do nothing, promise.”

“I should be fine tomorrow.”

Diosa frowned at the thermometer, showed it to Tam. “If you sleep. If not, the fever does not break.”

She dug into the pharmacy box. “Try these. Zopiclone. I get them when I had trouble to sleep, after my husband died.”  Diosa produced a sealed blister pack of sleeping pills. They were Zopiclone, all right. “You are very tall, like me, so try three.”

“Three.”

“They are not very strong.”

This was doubtless Diosa’s tactful way of saying Tam had kept everyone up last night. Tam wanted, briefly, to slit her own throat at being that disgusting. She wanted Diosa to go so she could call Hosna back. She knew she needed to sleep. “I’ll start with two.”

It took Tam a few extra moments to press two Zopiclone out, washing them down with the nearest beverage, the sports drink.

“Panadol also?”

“ _Sí, Captain Henr_ _íquez_. _Gracias._ ” That made Diosa smile, sadly, her brows crumpled.

“I will come again after dinner. _Adeus_.” The same goodbye as from the translator. Tam would be speaking Portuguese soon, at this rate.

Tam paused after the door closed. Diosa's withdrawal, for whatever reason, had a sting. _Stockholm Syndrome ahoy,_ Tam thought.

She took out the phone. There was a message on its screen. SEM SINAL. When Tam tried dialing, there was no tone, no chatter telling her she'd dialed wrong. They were out of service range. She and Hosna were cut off, far sooner than Tam expected. She let her head hit the pillow with a thud that felt final.

The inside of her head sloshed. The sleeping pills, she thought. They were all right, this once. Without them, she'd be clawing the cabin walls, losing her mind. As a rule, Stricklands and pills didn’t mix. Tam remembered her father, right before he died, across from her at the breakfast table. She’d waited for him to say something to her, anything. Instead, he’d stared through her, washed down four pain pills with milk straight from the bottle. When he’d first gone to Brazil, Tam’s anxious mother had spent a few weeks on Miltown tranquilizers. During those weeks, Tam had put both Timmy and her mother to bed at night. Tim had sped his way through college on amphetamines. Later, he’d burned through ten psych meds, seeking relief for his FBI-acquired PSTD that didn’t involve opening up to a therapist.

All the things they’d never talked about, her family. Their pain. Those drugs. Deus Brânquia…

Tam was falling into sleep, like a stone into deep water. Getting up to latch her cabin door was too much. She left it. As she went under, her last thoughts were that the fairy-wing chips of Zopiclone were not weak. That Diosa had lied.

She tumbled into vivid dreams. _She was trying to call Tim but the phone was tiny in her hands, her fingers clawed, thick, monstrous. When she got through, there was only static. She knew Tim was consumed by the static, strangling on it_ _—_

Tam opened her eyes to the reddish glow of sunset. “No,” she said, and sank again.

 _She was in Baltimore. Under the city, somehow. In a greenish hallway, the taste of green candy in her mouth. Sweating, anxiously. She was going to see a monster and it would be the death of her. She opened a door on a nightmare array of monitors, a squat demon in front of them. The demon_ _’s grin was pure obscenity_ _—_

Tam flipped herself over in bed. She cracked her window, desperate to wake. A stroke of night air caressed her face, humid and cool. The sun must have gone down. Her face found the only cool spot on her pillow. She dove into it like it was water.

 _She was in a vintage movie palace. Upstairs. For some reason, dream logic, there were two apartments there, even though music pounded from below and cinema lights played through the cheap floorboards_ _—_

Something was right about this dream. Tam glanced down at herself. It started with her outfit: very Katherine Hepburn, a white shirt tucked into tailored trousers, a good wool overcoat. The narrow black tie was a butch touch, its low, loose knot inviting another woman to adjust it. A box of hard candy rattled in one of the coat pockets. Something heavy weighed the other one. The sound and weight, together, reassured her.  

Tam looked right in front of her, alive with anticipation. Everything she wanted was behind that door. The woman she desired, and Deus Brânquia.

Her shoulders trembled with energy and strength. Yet her left hand was torn with pain. Inspired, Tam kicked at the door. Damn, that felt good. The door surrendered on the third slam, splintering gloriously. Tam shouldered through, determined.

Inside, she was immediately repulsed. The space was all olive-teal dimness, shabby, untidy, humid. The little flat’s kitchen was both depressing and from the Depression. A quick scan of the living area gave her nothing but the mess, a meal abandoned, pots and pans catching leaks. A wall with patchy blue paint warped in her vision, morphing for an instant into Housaki’s classic Great Wave.

She barged through this dreamspace into another doorway. There was a bedroom there, sad and sensual. Vintage high heels lined one wall. Tam imagined an elusive woman, face vague, nude but for a pair of those shoes. The multiplicity of the shoes promised night after night of lust. But there was already an imprint of two bodies on top of the bed. Seeing that set off Tam’s familiar flare of anger, twined with jealousy and disgust.

_Where are they?_

Going into the bathroom, Tam saw a large tub, left full of … algae? Its water was dark, as if filled from an Amazon river. Tam shucked the coat, rolled up a sleeve, ran her left hand’s fingertips in the water. It was warm, skin-temperature, silky-stinging with salt. She left her fingers trailing in the water to glance about. She sniffed. A strange, almost sexual smell was heady in the air.

There was a slimy clamp where the water met Tam’s flesh. She turned down to see that hideous monkey from years ago clinging to her arm, grinning.

It bit her.

 _Aaaah! Aaaaah! AAAAAH!_ Feeling its canines dig, all malice, Tam tried shaking it off, then dunking it. Instead of drowning, the monkey changed its grip underwater, blunted, grew stronger. Tam dragged her arm back, and with it surfaced another hand, white, hairy, mutilated, a man’s arm. Attached to her father, Richard Strickland.

Algae spangled his wide, blunt face. His chest and shoulders breached the water, nude. When her father opened his eyes, they were lit by madness. Tam tried to recoil, but his grip was far stronger than hers.

Strickland’s voice was hoarse, froggy as he clamped her wrist. He was as angry as he’d ever been. “What the fuck are you doing? I was gone – I was – hah. I see. It’s _your_ turn.”

Tam couldn’t talk. Her throat was sealed shut. The eldest Strickland was almost gleeful as he hissed, “You’re their creature, now. You think they’ll let you have your life. But they lie. Get out. Walk away. Run. I should’ve stayed where you are. Been the creature’s creature instead. Jungle god, _corta cabeza_. Could’ve hunted Deus Brânquia forever…”

Tam tried to jerk away, but her father kept hold, tilting his face up to her with his madman’s rictus grin. The motion opened his throat. Something had slit it ear to ear. Blood sheeted down.

Despite this, he spoke clearly.  “Listen to me. I need someone in this goddamn family to fucking listen. Don’t say I never do anything for you.”

He yanked Tam nearer. She thudded to her knees. Their forearms were entwined in the blood-warm water, their foreheads almost touching. His eyes blazed. “Listen. Deus Brânquia is merciful. But his girlfriend’s a fucking bitch.”

With that and a shake, her father shoved her back. “And wake the fuck up. _Now._ ”

Freed, Tam whirled her hand back to strike at him, but before the blow landed --

She was awake.

Tam sprang up and vomited. There was a bluish tinge to it, either from the sports drink or the Zopiclone. The blueness and bile together reminded her of that sickening bathtub. She retched more. Shoving back her hair brushed her hand across her forehead. The skin there was cool. Her fever had broken. It was after sunset, but before midnight. The monkeys' screams were at their peak.

Tam stood there, still roiled, furious. She slammed her right fist against the bathroom wall. “Motherfucker!”

As if in response, a gunshot punched through the night.

From the howls outside, not of monkeys but men, there was some kind of emergency. Someone was racing down. Tam was already primed with adrenaline. She dashed down to the end of the hall.

Never two without a third: Tam opened again on Diosa. The other woman stepped back from her, completely appalled. “You’re awake? I’m sorry, I – ” Her head lolled, eyes rolling up, and she collapsed forwards.

Tam caught her as she fell, eased her down. Was she sick, too? She had gone completely limp, enough that her head rolled forwards and something brushed Tam’s cheek. Tam pulled back to see a four-inch syringe protruding from the back of Diosa’s neck. 

Khaki-clad knees entered Tam’s vision. Tam looked up to see Preston there. "Thanks!" He beamed his fixed-ish grin. “I’ll be damned, one syringe worked. Remember, Hoffstetler’s defense -”

Tam sprang tall. “You did this? You?”

Tam’s terrible expression stopped Preston in his tracks. “I can explain -”

All white-hot rage, Tam screamed at him. Swept up the bow anchor from its cage, both hands. And scythed fifteen kilos of twin-bladed steel across one side of his face. The anchor’s momentum flowed to a second blow, back up against his skull.

Tam caught her balance as he went down, whipped her head up. Joe and Albi had appeared, more bodies in the tight deck space. Albi was in the hold door, biting his hat in terror. Joe had a solid grip on a sidearm as he yelled, "Fuckin' stand down!" Xono, sliding behind him, whipped a broom off its hook. In his hands, it became a fighting stave.

Screaming for her life, Tam launched herself at them.

Xono took one look and ducked, tossing the broom up. Joe cast down his sidearm for it. Holding it across him, he blocked Tam’s swing with the anchor, held it out. They struggled together for an instant, locked together by splintered wood and metal. Then Joe lifted the broom and shoved it away, letting it go, reversing the flow of weight. Tam’s back hit the hallway door. The anchor pounded the breath out of her from the front. Xono met her there with the sidearm at her temple. He clicked his tongue twice.

"No!" Joe roared. "She's gotta talk!"

Albi, too, was shouting, voice ragged, _“No m_ _ás! No m_ _ás!_ _”_

Tam braced herself. “He killed Diosa. Pres fucking killed Diosa!”

Joe yelled back, “She head-shot Willie. Tried for Pres. She was gonna kill you next.”

The sleeping pills. The goodbye. Tam let the anchor fall, the energy drain, at last. “Why?”

“To stop this. The, the expedition.”

Verdugo pounded down, latest of anybody. _“Que? Ai!_ _”_

“Preston. Preston...” Tam slit a hand across her throat. “Diosa.” She pointed to Diosa's body, the syringe still sunk deep. “That syringe, it’s poison. I saw her go down. Right in front of me. Preston was so…delighted. That’s why I – killed him. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” Verdugo screamed and flung himself down to Diosa, clasping her neck. Tam knew he wouldn't find a pulse.

The blood on Tam's right hand had gone sticky. More blood dotted down her sweaty tank top, across her tense forearms. Xono, mouth downturned hard, still had the sidearm's muzzle against her skull. "Do you believe me?"

Joe stepped up. A day after his mega-dose of the hunters’ drug, Joe was still operating on a different plane than the others. He, too, was physically vibrating. His pupils were buchité voids, taking Tam’s measure. The other men moved back, until Joe declared, “After that, yeah. ‘Cos if you were in on it, there’d be two women standing and three fellas dead.” Xono lowered the gun.

Joe turned away to scan the deck. “Where’s the gun? Where’s her pistol? Tam, say it so they look.”

Tam said it to Albi in Spanish. Luckily, the word _pistola_ overlapped with Portuguese. “ _Tenho, tenho!_ ” Verdugo found it beneath Diosa's right side. He handed it to Tam. It was still hot from being fired. Tam sickened anew, thinking of that hot metal, too, against her head. The sear of it waking her one final time.

Finding it soothed Joe. “Wrap it up in something. We can prove how Willie died.”

It all came together. After dinner, Diosa had said she’d seen some _boto_ , the pink dolphins. She’d urged the three Americans to where she said she’d seen them. Xono had been asked to look for a _boto_ from the stern. Albi, she had sent to check on the main generator – he had seen many _boto_ , after all. Well before this, Verdugo had been invited to wait in Diosa’s cabin. Tam had been knocked out first of all. Which matched how Diosa had killed Willie, leaning behind him to place the pistol against the base of his skull. A wild shot or two at Preston, and she’d headed for the stairs, saying she was going to stop it all. Preston, light and fast, had dashed after, ignoring Joe.

Again, Verdugo was the last to take it all in. He moaned, " _Porque?_ "

Tam was aghast. She knew enough. Like why Diosa had killed Willie first. Tam had said to her that Willie was the most dangerous. All the little things from Tam’s fever-dream day came together. Preston and Diosa’s exchange downstairs. Diosa's sympathy and fears, her stance as a Brazilian. Preston not taking Diosa seriously, sucking up to Tam. The uncharacteristic fluff of _Now you know I am silly._ Diosa's unhappiness at finding out Tam was as good as married. If Tam hadn't said that, it would've been easier for a good person to pull a trigger on her. She considered what Diosa must have felt watching her father fail and die, reading his log book and regrets. Most of all _: you are the one to find Deus Brânquia._ She was furious that the woman hadn't truly talked to her, that it had come to this.

Tam fell back on the useful Strickland family lie. "We'll never know."

A slow, wheezing groan rose from the deck. Something scrabbled. Tam and Joe glanced down at the same time. They looked back at each other, teeth clenched, mouths warped with horror. Joe half-whispered, “Pres. He’s not dead yet. Fuck. His skull...we can’t fix that...”

Where the broom had been, hung on the cabin's outside wall, other equipment waited, too. Joe unhooked a machete. Tears suddenly began to flood down his face.

Tam held out her hand. “Wait. I’ll...finish. It's my fault.” Joe released the machete to Tam. She took it in her right hand.

Everyone else alive stepped away. Tam said, “Someone go get some sheets.” Albi vanished like smoke.

Tam rocked the ruin of Preston back with one bare foot. He was warm, alive, wearing a Princeton t-shirt. Stab his heart? No. Tam placed the machete on the convulsing side of his throat, stabbed in. Another echo of that dream. The machete was mercifully sharp. More blood pooled. Verdugo pulled Diosa’s body away from the spreading gore.

Albi came back with an armful of sheets. He asked, in Spanish, “What do we do now?”

She glanced from Albi, holding the sheets high enough to bury his face, to Xono, stone-faced with horror, to Joe, staring at the blood like he saw something reflected in its spread. Verdugo was clutching Diosa’s corpse, gasping with misery, stroking Diosa’s braid. Tam thought about holding Hosna in her arms like that.

Joe pulled himself together with a shake. “I’m still on the job, eh. Took my oath when I joined up." He lifted his chin and extended a big hand towards Tam. "You made a deal. You said you do science, too. Do what you're here for, and that too? Help take him down, then bring him back, and I’ll put in the good word."

Tam understood. The punishment fit the crime. Having killed Preston, she would take his place to bring Deus Brânquia back, as priceless, living intellectual property. Here where she'd never wanted to be. She recalled Preston's total assurance that he could get anything he wanted in exchange for success. Would that, too, transfer to her?

“I will,” she said. The men shifted, each one relieved.

“So, we go on.” Tam lifted the machete in a half-ironic salute. “To Deus Brânquia!”

As blood and metal gleamed together in Tam’s hand, her father’s warning hissed in the back of her skull. _You_ _’re their creature, now._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A reminder this story is set in 2006: Tam's sucking at sending text messages on a tiny Nokia brick phone, and queer marriage wasn't legal in California until 2008.


	5. The Pulse of the Forest

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tam unpacks more revelations about Deus Brânquia. A final confrontation sorts out who’s in charge, now. Horror and guilt undermine those who remain, despite the splendour of the rainforest. And, at last, it's time to try and recapture Deus Brânquia. But the bait they set might tempt someone besides the gill-god. Warnings increase for this chapter, again!

_No one asks Richard Strickland about his motivation. Until now, he didn’t have an answer. Never gave a shit about Deus Brânquia, that’s for sure. Now there’s nothing in the world he wants more..._

* * *

The candy turned out to be a great idea.

The next day, Tam still hadn’t eaten by midmorning. Not after her sickness, nor after helping sluice blood and bone fragments off the deck.  A couple of the glassy green candies kept Tam powering through. She’d force something down when she felt fully well. Stopping right now would be a sign of weakness. After last night, she was the only surviving killer. Tam had made the machete her own, laced its sheath onto her belt. She wasn’t sure the others wouldn’t turn on her if she put it down. Especially Verdugo.

Who was in charge? It was hard to say. An uncomfortable triangle had taken shape: Tam, Joe, and Verdugo. Joe and Verdugo had a language barrier between them. Joe kept pausing, like he needed new batteries. Verdugo, for all his stalking and fuming, wasn’t really doing much. Yet. Tam, fired up on blood and sugar, was still going, and things had to happen.

First, there were the bodies. Willie, head-shot by Diosa as he'd leaned over a railing, had tumbled overboard. They’d done a night search with LED work lights, hauled his corpse back up while caimans hissed in protest. Joe had let off some steam by dispatching one of them. Once all the bodies were retrieved and orderly, Tam, thinking of Hosna and her cats, had told the men to get them into the freezer. The three corpses fit if they were curled into fetal position. That even left room for one more.

At dawn, Tam asked Albi to have a word with Yaní. Their cook had not emerged in all the chaos: Tam wondered if she was hard of hearing. Albi spun her a preposterous story about a love triangle ending in tragedy. It was straight out of a telenovela, but it was still more probable than what had actually happened. Again at Tam's nudging, Joe went into Preston's quarters and came out with some cash for a 'bonus' for her. Yaní, stone-faced, accepted it all.

Next, Tam went through Preston’s equipment. They had to pull Preston’s body out of the freezer to do that. Tam chopped off his right hand, then his left, to find the finger that swiped into his laptop. It took her a few tries to guess his password: not Hoffstetler, but Moskenov.

Preston’s equipment did not encourage Tam’s appetite to return. There were veterinary drugs. Syringes. IV lines. Cylinders of gases. A biopsy sampling set with flesh punches and scrapers. Latex-sheathed waterproof restraints, some with electroshockers built in. And the device in the refrigerator-sized crate that brought them all together. That had, probably, sent Diosa over the edge. Tam could see its awful side. But it was so clinical, so clean, compared to the crude equipment of the past. She felt there could be a right way to use it.

Searching for its manual on the laptop, Tam got distracted by more official records. These were from the 1962 mission and the aftermath at Occam. It seemed that Deus Brânquia not only sensed electrical fields, X-rays, and the like, it had energies of its own. Tam wiped the sweat off her hands as she read. Preston had hidden how vulnerable the crew might be to ineffable damage from Deus Brânquia’s presence.

At Occam, in 1962, there had been six MPs guarding and handling the Asset. They had come to as dismal and sordid an end as Elisa. Within a fortnight, two of the MPs had been caught wrapped around each other in an Occam supply closet, dishonorably discharged, found guilty of sodomy. Within a year, three of the other MPs had committed suicide. By the end of 1969, the last MP had become the compelling leader of something very like a cult. He had been shot by the CIA. Tam thought of the men in Henriquez’ crew who had also killed themselves. Of her father.

Finally, Tam found the manual. Soon, she was shifting the splintered lid of the refrigerator-size crate and searching for extension cables. Half an hour later, she called the men down to the hold. Her career's work with artifacts, museums, and negotiations was about to pay off. Things told a story, she knew.

When the four men arrived, all she had to do was gesture. “Check. This. Out.”

They swore in four different languages. Tam went on, alternating English and Spanish. “It’s a custom-designed travel aquarium.” Tam thought of it as the sarcophagus. Fitting, to transport a river god. Its angled outside was matte black enamel with panels of black padding, gray handles. Its sides were punctuated with apertures. The front had panels of buttons, lights, data displays. There was dark glass over where a humanoid’s face would dream inside the device. It was, overall, the size and shape of a coffin.

“Locked and armored. There’s IV feeds for sedatives, gas lines to balance the oxygen in the water, timed saline and water nutrient release, filtration. Xono. Press that button there?” Tam pointed right at it. Cautiously, Xono did.

Something chirped. A fan began to hum. “It’s working!” Green LEDs flicked to life, lighting the face plate. Red lights filled the front, as if a game had already been won. After days of river shabbiness, the magnificent thing felt sacred, miraculous, a herald of Deus Brânquia.

Joe said, “So, once we catch him, we put him in there?”

“Yeah. I mean, we can have him in the tub. But there’d be a lot more cleanup and risk.” Both physical and psychological, but Tam left that unsaid, as Preston had. Tam held up some of the electrified shackles, “And do we really feel comfortable with these?”

Verdugo quipped in Portuguese, right on the edge of Tam’s understanding. Albi translated. “Verdugo says he can play.” There was uneasy laughter. It said something positive about the other men, Tam thought, that they found excuses to drift off, after that.

Verdugo stayed.

Tam braced herself, a lightning rod before a storm. Whatever was going to come next was inevitable, overdue. 

Verdugo tried a phrase. Tam didn’t get it. He said something similar, but different. _Can we talk_ , he meant.

Tam relaxed an increment. _Yes_ , she said. _A little._ She made a hand gesture for ‘small’. They might bridge their language gap, barely, in the overlap between Spanish and Portuguese.

Verdugo was, annoyingly, smoking one of Diosa’s cigarillos. He offered one to her. Nausea rising, Tam declined. She stood below the hold stairs for a breath of air.

Verdugo began. “Who is – the big. The president of the boat.”

Tam gestured around. Between optimistic and tactful, unsure if she was easing towards being in charge or turning into her mother, Tam said, “Collective.”

Verdugo mirrored the gesture and nodded.  “You killed the man who killed my woman.” He made a bashing gesture. “It’s good. Also, your father. My grandfather. Dead. Because of Deus Brânquia. You and me.”

“Yes,” Tam said, drawing it out dubiously. “What do you –“ she backed off from the word _want,_ which implied desire – “need?”

Verdugo caught this. “Do not hope, my old one. All I desire is to kill Deus Brânquia. Me. I do it.” As he said it, his eyes were green fire.

“Uh. No.” Tam gestured around her at the equipment. “All I describe. To bring him home.”

Verdugo pointed at the freezer. “For if he is dead.”

“Yes,” Tam admitted. “But more if alive.” Tam rubbed the fingers of one hand together, a sign for money.

“Not for me.” His own hands curled to fists.

This was manageable. “It is possible.”

“This is more than money.” Verdugo exhaled, sending smoke out his nostrils, and ground out the cigarillo underfoot. “I am surprised. You are a woman after all, soft for a _bicho_. Move. I will go tell the men.”

Tam blocked the ladder-stair out. She frowned, shook her head. Giving in to this would be the first loss on a slippery slope.

Verdugo stepped right up to her.

Tam went one step up the wooden ladder-stair. She hooked herself in place, locking her arms through its side rails. “No. We have responsibility.”

Tam had screamed in enough people’s faces to get her way that it didn’t do much when Verdugo tried it on her. _Bruxa, fanchona, capeta ianque_ \- She lost track of his words, no meaning to them but hatred. She gritted her teeth and glared, endured a slap across her face – until he pulled a gutting knife. Tam yelled, “Joe! Albi! _Ay_ _ú_ _dam_ _e_ _!_ _”_ Her blood went to white ice. Was this it? Would they leave her to this?

Verdugo feinted at her belly, then, as she swung her right arm to shield herself and grab the machete, he veered off to stab at her left hand. Tam heard the knife chunk into wood, felt pain. She took the siderails in both hands, curled both legs, launched her pelvis, kicking him away with both feet.

Verdugo staggered back, reeling on one foot - and the _Guilhermino_ _’s_ engines kicked to life. The boat rocked forwards. Verdugo rocked back. He went down, and the hard edge of the freezer was in the way.

“Bloody oath! Why’d the fucker start it with y’s?” Tam turned her face up to see Joe shadowing the entrance.

She went bloodless with relief. “He. He wanted to kill Deus Brânquia. Not bring him back alive.”

“Lemme get down! Where is he?”

Tam unmonkeyed herself from the ladder. “Over there. Watch it, he tried to stab me. The knife’s in the…in the here.” She examined her hand as Joe bounced down. Verdugo had knifed the wood one centimeter below her grip. There was a nick across her two lowest knuckles. Tam thought of what had heralded her father’s death, his rotting injured hand, and leaned hard against the ladder-stair.

She was shuddering, cold yet ablaze. Her right arm tensed with yearning to repeat the thick machete-stab of last night. The empty purity of it that had eradicated, for a time, her rage. She closed her eyes, took a mindful breath. Exhaustion hammered her, the void of her mind waiting for her to fall into it. She opened her eyes again.

Joe was waving a hand in front of her face. “Hey. Hey. You’ve got some shock. Sit down. ‘S okay. It’s not like you killed him, eh.”

Tam staggered to the chair in front of Preston’s laptop, then paused. “I’m not so sure about that.” She pointed. Verdugo lolled where the _Guilhermino_ had sent him. A thin line of blood had begun to trail across the linoleum beneath Verdugo’s head. In every fighting class Tam had taken, they’d all been told that blows to the back of the head were the quickest way to kill.

Tam watched, dispassionate, as Joe turned and examined Verdugo. “Bugger.” He was dead. She found herself empty of regret. Joe’s cursing was the opposite of Verdugo’s, almost compliments. “Bloody thick as two plates, bringin’ it to you.”

“I’ll get some sheets in a minute,” Tam said. Sheets: beds: why had Diosa slept with Verdugo? Those looks, his flagrant flaunting. He had seen either prey or trophy in Diosa’s charm. Which may have had its own appeal, for many men stopped seeing women who were past fifty. Tam’s relief at that was other women’s pain and loss. There were simpler, human reasons, especially on this boat. Loneliness. Fear. The comfort of country. The things that led Tam to speak to Joe now.

“Do you want one of these?” Tam held out the box of candy she had opened. It was tiny in Joe’s hand. “Take two.”

“Mmph. Like Jolly Ranchers.” Mouth puckered, Joe mumbled, “What's in 'em? I can feel the decay happening.”

Tam found she could laugh a little, and it was strangely hard to stop. A new awareness lit her up, taking the energy of shock upon shock and turning it into fuel. She didn’t need buchité for inspiration sharp as the machete’s edge. “Do you think he had a point? Just kill Deus Brânquia and bring back the body?” She already knew the answer, after he’d bargained with her last night. With him still putting up with her, here and now.

Joe instantly went panicky. “We got the stuff and our orders and – no. No. Xono, he’s. He’s living for it.”

“I…agree. I need Deus Brânquia so I can get my life back. You said you have a job, an oath. What have you done for it before, Joe?” Tam stood, loose-jointed. Joe had time to answer, and did not.

Tam put her hands on her hips. “We -  I - spent some time in Iraq. In 2003. I _saw_. You mentioned something you did, down there. Was it friendly fire? The wrong man’s dead body?” Tam laughed again, loose as her joints, spreading her hands back out. “It doesn’t matter. Who am I to talk?”

“But. If you’re desperate enough to keep this going, you need Deus Brânquia, too. I can prove it. Here, on the computer.”

Tam sat back down. She swiped Preston’s left hand, logging in to open a file on the laptop. This file had good news. “Willie was right. Preston should’ve respected the locals more. Their rumors about Deus Brânquia healing them were true. Preston was holding out on us. Back in ’62... the scientist Preston kept talking about, Hoffstettler, a Russian spy, used to be depressed. He was on the brink of killing himself, saw the creature in its tank, decided to live again. A different man, a has-been artist and an alcoholic, spent some time with Deus Brânquia. Giles Dupont. Ten years after he was still clean, sober, starting to get famous for his work. I know – I met him, then.”

Before Tam could describe Giles' near-cosmic creative vibe, something shivered in the edge of her vision. Joe was still standing beside her. His hands were shaking, his voice rough-hewn. “You didn’t need to show me. I knew that. The buchité…it does what they said. I saw him already. He told me. Himself.” Turning up, Tam saw his eyes wide, black, and fixed, that hunter’s stare.

Tam held his gaze, thinking of six dead MPs. Diosa’s treachery. Her father. It came to her that by helping this man, she might, somehow, prevent another Strickland. She brushed Joe's elbow with her bleeding hand. “I believe you.”

Relieved, Joe half-knelt beside her, bouncing on his heels. “You seen the plan? Maddest fish trap in the world, eh?”

Tam turned the chair to face him. “That’s it. That’s it exactly. It’s fishing, not hunting. So, Verdugo – it’s for the best that he’s out of the picture.”

Tam saw Joe lean into her idea, rock away. “This is…it’s fucked up.”

Words poured out of her, truths she was channeling. “You’re a good man, Joe. A decent man. Listen. It’s all right. Fucking up doesn’t matter out here. Right now, we’re lost to civilization. Preston said anything between here and Deus Brânquia can be off the record. Once we deliver him, we’re golden. And we won’t fail. I won’t fail. I don’t. I wouldn’t have my life, I wouldn’t be who I am, if I did.”

Her voice dried, rasped. “Believe me like I believe you. We _will_ deliver.”

Joe’s buchité-opened eyes flickered over it all. The corpse, the knife, Deus Brânquia on screen, the hand chopped free, Tam’s face. Tam caught that he stopped breathing.

She asked, “Can you pray again? For all of us. For this.”

Joe lowered one knee. “I will. I promise. Just – Jesus – please — ” He turned away from the hand, or her, or both.

Tam felt settled, at last, about who was in charge. She said, serenely, “To Jesus is fine. It’s all the same, in the end.”

* * *

They still had to get to the area where the sightings had been. While Tam had been sick, they had changed course. Now, they sailed almost exactly along the Equator, the hot girdle of the world. The _Guilhermino_ bellied far larger on this smaller tributary. They would drift this way for seven to ten days.

Here, the river’s turns wound unbroken by buildings or clearings. Foggy dawns gave way to overcast days. Afternoon rains, never enough to end the humidity, overlapped with  short, intense sunsets. Trees walled in the river, soaring three hundred feet high, sheltering flights of macaws, visible huddles of monkeys. The banks had clusters of capybaras and turtles. Tapir and deer splashed away from them. Sometimes, fish two meters long would follow the boat, their bodies darkly golden in the tannin-laden water. The river's turns were softened with arcs of white sand. They did not stop to lounge on the small beaches. They were all busy.

Tam wasn’t the only one burned out enough to take Verdugo’s death with a shrug. The split between those who planned for Deus Brânquia and those who worked daily was gone. At first, they were tighter for it. During the day, Tam and Albi took turns wrangling the boat. Joe kept them sounding respectable to their minders, saying over short-wave radio it was Preston’s turn to be down with _tourista_. Xono watched the forest, counting off landmarks invisible to the others.

Tam relaxed Diosa’s rules. When they dropped anchor for the night, Xono could hop overboard. He always returned with something he’d hunted.  Yaní, stoic as ever, accepted the long, muddy fish and glassy-eyed animals.  Yaní’s bonus was worth it. She could make anything edible – a talent as good as a superpower on this river.

Their second day after all the changes, Xono came to Tam at the helm. He gestured. Tam swung the autopilot into place and tiptoed out, interested.  On the river’s right bank, there was a cluster of people rather like Xono, vivid with red paint.

Tam, excited, waved at them. Most of them fled instantly. One of them, the only one wearing a t-shirt, shot an arrow at them. It caught in the railing, hit the water harmlessly. The archer's words didn't. _“Maldito traidor! Con la corta cabeza…”_

Xono blanched. He and Tam exchanged an awful glance. They meant him, and they meant her.

Tam couldn’t sleep that night, thinking of it. _Fucking traitor! With the corta cabeza…_ Those people didn’t understand. If they could talk, she could work it out. That was what she did, for God’s sake. What were the possibilities with Deus Brânquia in her hands? Key to immortality, the hottest bargaining chip in the world. A few dead men would be nothing to that. In exchange, the powers that were would solve her problems, Hosna’s, the crew’s. She’d speak up for Brazil’s share – Tam’s mind raced, considering the precedents in other countries. She could strike a deal to benefit the battered, troubled indios here like never before. She pictured herself after the hunt was complete, laying a hand on the sarcophagus, sealed around its sleeping god. Feeling it hum with infinite potential for humanity’s greater good.

In Tam’s cabin doorway, open for ventilation, silhouettes wavered on the edge of her vision. Trim people – Diosa? Dead MPs? Her father? Was she dreaming, again? If she turned to try and focus on them, they might vanish.  Without looking their way, she said, “You’ll help us?”

Only silence, in the dark heart of the boat.

“You’ll help me…” They had to. She was alone, otherwise.

On their third night,  Yaní served up a heavy meat. With the man who'd hunted it at the table across from her, Tam ate some, slowly. It turned out to be monkey. She managed to make it downstairs to vomit with some discretion. Lifting her head, she had heard every primate in the Amazon screaming at her. She stopped eating any meat or fish, after that.

By then, Joe and Xono had moved upstairs to the top deck, living outside all day and night. It took Tam until the fourth day to visit, she was so occupied. The afternoon she made it up, she had been breaking down the packing materials that crowded the lab. It was a good way to burn off some of her nervous energy. She was learning why machetes were classics. They became a natural extension of your arm so quickly. Absent-mindedly, she still used the machete to slide their tarp door to one side. “Hi there!”

The two men froze. They were, Tam saw, sharing earbuds, listening to music together. She eased herself in, smiled. “Just a social call. I like what you’ve done up here. It’s cute. Like a clubhouse.” They stayed still, uncertain. Joe removed his earbud. Tam shifted some hanging fabric, again with the machete. “You’ve got mosquito nets, good. Don’t the monkeys bother you, up here?”

Joe said, “Monkeys?”

“The sound of them. That’s what we hear all day, coming from the forest. Screaming and screaming.”

There was a pause. Joe solemnly lifted up his earbud.

“Nice! Smart. I should’ve…if I’d had time to prepare…” Tam inhaled, suddenly angry, thinking how this had all begun.

Xono took out his earbud, too. Joe stood, shifting in front of his friend. A moment of tension stretched like the earbuds’ red wires.

Tam remembered that they didn’t have monkeys where he was from. He hadn’t known, himself: he couldn’t have warned her. Or known she was going to suffer. “Didn’t mean to break up your male bonding time. I’ll leave you to it.” Her father, she recalled, had said asinine things like that when he was trying to be nice.

Tam withdrew. She took the stairs slowly, her heightened pulse, the saliva in her mouth, echoing what had thrummed through her at other times with the machete in her hand. It was, she told herself, satisfaction at being respected.

Albi had relocated to the captain’s cabin, with his pillows from his previous bunk to keep his torso comfortable. Tam kept his steering duty light so he could focus on the engines and generators. The last thing they wanted was generator trouble. When free from those duties Albi lay down a lot, staring into space or sleeping. “Let him rest,” Tam told the others. He probably knew where Diosa’s pharmacy box was, to rest like that. As long as he got up again, Tam told herself.

This left Tam in relative privacy, with the lower deck hers entirely.

The privacy didn’t help her sleep. That night, she turned again and again, restless. She was sick of it all. She wanted her clean, tidy house and animals that weren’t dead and Hosna’s shining dark head nestling just so into the hollow of her shoulder. Hosna’s caressingly soft skin against her, spontaneous kisses that led so easily to more...

Tam reached between her legs, seeking relief from her boundless energy. Imagining Hosna at her most deliciously domineering captivated her. But every time she came close, she’d think of the bondage gear waiting downstairs, or her main image of Deus Brânquia, chained and screaming. Tam finally gave up. She was left sore, more frustrated than before, with a resentment of Deus Brânquia that she didn’t want to name.

This time, Tam got up in the dark to read. Preston’s left hand, defrosted and refrozen and defrosted in the tropical heat, had gone soft and stinking. The laptop was a silent slab, now. But she had what she needed from it. Preston would have been gratified to see how she’d gone through his Powerpoint again and again and again. She had scanned everything for any mention, beyond Diosa's rumor and her fever-dream warning, of a mate or girlfriend or companion for the creature in later sightings. The laptop had nothing, for all that its 1960s photos of the creature were now branded on her brain.

Henríquez’s log book kept her company this night, and it had a little something. The previous captain recounted telling Tam's father about the _boto._ Local legend had it that those Amazon dolphins turned into handsome lovers for river women. "I think it is a hopeful story. Is not some underwater paradise preferable to a life of poverty and incest and violence?" Tam shuddered at the implications.

She felt at long last for her father, dealing with demanding scientists like Preston, traveling with men like Henríquez who'd say things like that. Influenced heaven knew how by that creature, restless and seething. Suffused with enough craziness that he hadn’t had time to lance it before coming home. That had spilled over into rot and harshness, visions and pain, killing or being killed. As if he never had managed to leave this place, its jungles.

Tam read until dawn. Then, she went to the prow for her morning ritual, and her own, more complex, take on those same jungles.

Tam had finally cracked meditation. There was, she thought, something to the spirituality of the rainforest, after all. She stood barefoot, palms turned out, feeling the sway of the boat beneath her. The dawn mists cooled her as they infiltrated her clothes. Breathing, she lost herself in the dawn cries of the monkeys and birds. The monkeys’ calls were less agonized at this time of the day. She felt the pulse of the forest, soft and clear, like she had the machete to its throat.

She meditated with one intent: to draw in Deus Brânquia. Her thought was, simply, _Come to us. Come. We need you. I need you. Come._ She found pure loss of self in setting aside everything else but that. No names. No ranks or roles. It felt like the very edge of transcendence, reeling there, all desire winnowed down to one thing.

Eventually, Tam returned to herself, sometimes well after the sun had fully risen. She would slide a candy into her mouth and haul the two anchors, fore and aft, on board. Nobody else would touch them. Nor would they emerge until the decks were free of Tam with metal in her hands.

On the ninth morning, Tam, by accident, uncovered the lucky bag in her cabin. With the hold and the lower deck and the wheelhouse as her territory, she only came in to try for a few hours of sleep. The cabin was practically a nest, now. The bag had been buried under her flung-about items. She contemplated the relics within. Useless phones, meaningless bank cards, the dead weight of her portfolio. She held the Clif bar in her hand, chucked it back in. The idea of its heavy richness nauseated her.

The next thing that came to her hand was the notebook. She knew, the moment she touched it, that she, too, would write. Once she’d captured Deus Brânquia, when it was his turn to be wrapped in pharmaceutical dreams, she’d sit by him and capture it all. That was what led her to sling the bag over her shoulder before going out to wrangle anchors. 

The bag still had its mojo. She was at the wheel when Albi whirled in, coming closer to her than anyone had in days. “Go and see. It is important. Important and good.” Tam gave him the wheel and went to drop anchor. They were in the waters Diosa had warned them about, where autopilot was too risky. This done, she went to the prow to see what Albi had found that was both good and important.

The others were on deck already. They barely glanced at her joining them. The four of them gazed off the port bow, handing around a pair of binoculars. When the binoculars came to her, Tam looked. And looked. After a solid minute, she broke the silence. “This must be the place.”

Albi took his hat off and breathed, _“_ _Il jardim de Deus Br_ _â_ _nquia._ _”_ Xono went to his knees. Joe crossed himself.

On the shore, the jungle’s walls of greenery were softened, indented around a dark threadline path into the interior. The entry was marked by what surrounded it. Flowering epiphytes and parasites, orchids and bromeliads, cascaded from the top of the trees’ canopy down to the ground, a vivid-and-pastel swathe amidst the heavy evergreen. The waters before this bower were shallow, swampy, tangled with lily-pads and water hyacinth. It was hard to tell where the land flowers turned into the water flowers. The slow river was nearly silent, here. Even from the boat, they could hear the hum and see the glitter and flutter of insects rioting amongst the flowers. Binoculars revealed that butterflies spun up and down the trellises of flowers, like loose petals.

To herself, Tam translated what Albi had meant. They had come at last to the sighting that had launched this entire mission. The garden of Deus Brânquia.

“We’ll set up at dusk. Get ready.”

* * *

They waited until the red sunset skimmed below the clouds. In an overloaded skiff, the four of them hacked their way to the shore, leaving chopped water-greenery behind them.

As they searched for a landing spot, Xono tapped Tam’s arm and pointed. Again, Tam saw the glade’s very small path worn to bare earth. In this impenetrable green, it had the same meaning as a four-lane expressway. Something was walking here regularly. Xono sent them back upstream to hide the skiff. The river’s edge was marshy. They made a human chain between the skiff and dry land, tossing each other bundles and boxes. Finally, they had all floundered ashore. Save for their splashes, they were all silent.

When they had returned to the path, Xono pointed again. His arm vibrated slightly. He and Joe had gone all-out on the buchité. Tucked beneath low plants that had sprung upright was a footprint. Tam set her foot beside it. Her shoe was half its size. They all inhaled, shifted on their feet, swapped glances. Tam felt the men thrum with the same wanting excitement that had held her rapt for days. They were, at last, joining her in the hunt.

Xono gestured them onto the central path, following after them, brushing their tracks away with his bare feet. The path led into a glade, struck open some years back by a falling giant of the rainforest. It was long and narrow. The central log was completing its decay into bark and wood chips. Perhaps the indios had camped here. But they were gone, now, and the sides of the glade, too, dripped with flowering plants and hummed with insects. The air swam with a delicate scent between perfume and honey, deepened with rot.

Tam progressed up the glade like she was in another dream. At a point where the canopy of trees thinned above, she stopped. She whispered. “Here.”

They were the harmonious crew Diosa had dreamed of. Being near-silent together gave their preparations the quality of a dance. Xono, backed by Joe, did the first round of set-up. As he finished, Joe went walkabout. He returned with three excellent surveillance points. Albi, having declined buchité, stowed baggage, got the wired men to drink water, helped Tam with her essentials. Joe also ran a check on their weapons, tranquilizer darts for Xono and Albi, a speargun with a tethered javelin for himself. Xono had his own set of bolas, that throwing weapon designed to tangle a runner's legs. All of them had pistols with silencers.

Tam had her own preparations. Here in the heart of the rainforest, she agreed wholeheartedly with Preston. The outfit the Occam minds would have had her wear was ludicrous. Tam shoved the teal dress and dark wig back for Albi to repack. She did don the teal apron over her blue shirt. It felt artistic. It also did a good job concealing her own pistol and machete, and gave her pockets for a set of latex-wrapped wrist cuffs. She added a slim paintbrush behind her left ear. They were part of the equipment, too, along with paints, canvas, and an easel.

Men with open weapons? The creature knew better, now. But it had been tamed by a cleaning lady, been biddable for an artist, in its strange Baltimore adventure. So they’d brought all that back to the middle of his territory. They’d put Tam in the middle, as their quantum attractor, who knew how or why. All that remained was one final, assured temptation.

Tam shifted a water-resistant boom box. It was heavy with batteries, loaded with a long-running CD. “Ready?” she whispered. The others nodded. Joe gave her two thumbs up. Tam poised one finger.

And pressed PLAY.

 _J'avoue j'en ai bav_ _é pas vous mon amour, avant d'avoir eu vent de vous mon amour_ _…_

Retro music poured out, exquisitely amplified. The forest around them fell silent with astonishment. Birds recovered first to chime in. Monkeys added their booms and squeaks, helping Tam at long last. Under the cover of the music, the men went to their lookout points. Now, Tam thought, for the tricky part.

The part where she had to paint.

Tam turned to the mini-studio set up in the glade's center. Nobody had ever asked her if she could paint. She’d had a few years of art classes in high school, even a tutor for a while. Based on the plan, Occam probably knew about the classes. But not about how badly she’d done, for they were ungraded extracurriculars. The tutor had said she didn't have a grasp on perspective. Tam still remembered enough to set up a palette with paint ready for the canvas. She set the lucky bag at the base of the easel and began.

Tam strove to remember what she’d seen on her one visit to Giles in his studio. That old liar, the things he hadn’t told her, letting her make a fool of herself – no, she hadn’t. The main reason she’d gone there remained true. Her father had killed Elisa, Giles’ adopted daughter. Elisa’s thin face flashed in her mind: she blocked it out.

What the hell would Deus Brânquia like to see? Again, she blocked out the obvious. Tam settled on landscapes. She’d been laid up for a while in the '80s with a broken arm, and had convalesced watching Bob Ross’ painting show every day. Bob Ross and Giles, both old enough to be surely dead, blended together into a ghostly mentor at the edge of her vision. Tam laid down a background, tree trunks. She pattered brushes to create a layer of leaves.

The past few days had taken her beyond hunger and sleep. Her reward for this purity was intensity, the sense she could turn on a dime and handle anything. So, in painting, Tam was fascinated by the work, the textures of it. In her mouth, the current candy was down to a sliver. She could hum along to the music.

 _That old black magic has me in its spell, old black magic that you weave so well_ _…_

Tam was on a second layer of pattering now, dabs meant to indicate the flowers. She decided to give the flowers, as Bob Ross always recommended, a little friend. Tam found herself painting the elemental outline of a woman. As she dipped the finest brush to trail long, dark locks over a tiny brown shoulder, she breathed, “Hosna.”

Tam hadn't thought of her in days: as if her failed attempt at self-satisfaction had been, somehow, Hosna's fault. Here, free of the boat, miserable longing flattened her. She wished powerfully that Hosna was there to marvel at the flowers. But her lover’s existence felt as unreal as this place. She'd loved a _peri_ , a sphinx, a princess in a long-concluded fairy tale.

 _You went away and my heart went with you, I speak your name in my every prayer_ _…_

Tam dashed the weakness of a tear away. Her cheek was hard under her hand. When had she gotten so raw-boned? She'd add an extra brushstroke of lushness to the woman’s hips.

Just as Tam dabbed a brush against the palette, she paused. She might have heard a footstep rustle behind her. Not the crackling stomp of one of the men. Something gentler. Shyer. Glancing back, Tam's mood flipped instantly into rage. Had those drugged-up idiots let Deus Brânquia slide behind her, unseen? Tam forced herself to turn around, lift the paintbrush again.

The music rolled into a new song. It was the most syrupy tune yet. But, amidst this heady, overloaded glade, the lyrics made the hair rise on the back of Tam’s neck.

 _Why do robins sing in December_  
_Long before the Springtime is due?_  
_And even though it's snowing, violets are growing_  
_I know why and so do you_

A monkey’s stuttering scream cut through the music. It was very low to the ground. So low that Tam knew it for one of the men’s signals.

Deus Brânquia had been sighted.

Slowly, Tam put the palette down. She stepped back, pretending to consider her work, blind to it. Nothing was behind her when she turned. She did her utmost to stroll with her best not-spooking-animals vibe, one hand discreetly in the apron's front pocket, readying the gyves. Carefully, so carefully, she worked through the brush at the edge of the glade, to Albi’s station.

When she got there, she wished she'd run.

Poor Albi. His tropical shirt was unbuttoned, open over the wrongness of his abdomen’s swell - a sick man indeed. His hat rested softly over his face. Below it, his throat was slit, like her father’s in the nightmare. Cured of what ailed him, forevermore… 

Before Tam could react, she heard another cry close to the ground. Tam leapt around brush, shifted branches as fast as she could. Xono was on the other side, between the glade and the forest. She nearly face-planted, forced herself to go more carefully.

Xono wasn’t in a hurry to leave, there, dead on the ground. Tam had guessed his affliction was a culture-bound syndrome. That could range from sincere belief in a curse to the near-mortal depression of knowing your people’s way was destroyed beyond repair. Xono had tried to remake himself one way, and turned from that to Deus Brânquia. For his courage, this cure: a living caul of writhing creatures, consuming him into reunion with the forest…

Tam heard a blunted shot.

She remembered Diosa’s prescient words. _Never two without a third._ She barged towards the river, bashing at underbrush, tripping on lianas.

Joe was peaceful when she found him. He was sitting at the base of a buttress-rooted tree, cross-legged, his pistol in his lap, mouth open in astonishment. Tam huffed a half-laugh in hysterical relief. Surely, Deus Brânquia, seen in the flesh through buchité-vision, must have blown his mind. That had to be all it was.

“Hey, Joe? Join us back on Planet Earth?”  Tam brushed his cheek gently.

At her touch, his head slumped forwards. The back of his skull was blown out, wood splintered white and drenched thick crimson behind him.

Tam flinched back, a hand over her scream, strangling herself mute. Full-body shaking rattled her. What had Deus Brânquia told him, up close and personal, that brought him to this? What had he seen?

Was it even Deus Brânquia? Her father’s warning blazed. _Deus Br_ _â_ _nquia is merciful. But his girlfriend_ _’_ _s a fucking bitch_ _…_

Tam felt hot tears streaming over her smothering hand. These had been good people. All they’d wanted was healing. Gentle Albi, skilled, determined Xono. Joe, the brother she should have had, kind and honorable. Courageous, confident Diosa, the sister of her dreams. It hadn’t been about revenge for Tam before. But it was, now.

Fury and adrenaline made her one with the forest. Her vision was still blurred with tears, white-flashed with rage, but her other senses sharpened. She could hear a twig crack underfoot, smell the out-of-place breath of brine, taste blood. Tam jerked her feet free of socks and boots to soft-foot it back near the easel. She’d have sworn her bare feet tapped into the mycological decay lacing underfoot to _feel_ where something stood. Like the luring orchid, the lurking caiman, the clever monkey, Tam knew where her prey would be.

_When you smile at me, I hear gypsy violins  
When you dance with me, I'm in heaven when the music begins_

Tam stopped before the clearing. She could only see parts of the easel through a lattice of leaves and blooms. Stems and branches obscured another being’s face. A silvery biped was standing out there, contemplating the easel. Dusk’s low light picked out fins, flickered on jewel-like scales. It turned, smooth as a dancer with the promise of speed.

But the glimmer out there paused. Bowed down. Picked up Tam’s abandoned lucky bag. And settled in for an extended examination of this perplexing foreign object.

 _I can see the sun when it's raining, hiding every cloud from my view_  
_And why do I see rainbows when you're in my arms?_  
_I know why and so do you_

The final trill of the music swelled. It covered the hiss of Tam unsheathing the machete.

_I know why and so do you---_

One chop from Tam’s machete cut a stay-rope. Leaves rustled as a tall sapling, bent by Xono, sprang upright. The shining figure turned up from the bag, too late. For a trappers’ net laid below leaves and petals whipped up around the creature. The tree rocked tall, swayed in rebound, bounced the net’s burden right at Tam’s feet.

This gave Tam one chance to take it down. She tackle-pulled it to her with a shout.

It was smaller than she’d expected and just as slimy. Tam fought like a girl, flat hard slaps punctuated with defiant screams, knees and elbows sent where they counted. And it was hers, nobody else's, this tangle of lashing limbs, sticky terror, scratching and flailing but no match for her ruthless fury. Her nicked left hand found a wrist. Tam clamped, pressed where a nerve should be. She was rewarded by the thing beneath her crumpling in pain. She flung her full weight on top of that slick body with a snarl of triumph – and stopped.

This didn’t feel wrong enough. The scaly creature Tam pinned beneath her was too human. Tam was looking down on a dead woman's face.

That of Elisa Esposito.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Ayúdame_ – Spanish for “Help me.”  
>  _Bicho_ \- Both Spanish and Portuguese. In this context, an animal.  
>  _Bruxa, fanchona, capeta ianque_ \- Portuguese for: witch, bulldagger, Yankee devil.  
>  Jolly Ranchers – What is _in_ these American hard candies? I swear you can feel your teeth rotting the minute you put one in your mouth.  
>  _I think it is a hopeful story..._ Direct quote from Krause and Del Toro's _Shape of Water_ novel.  
>  _J'avoue j'en ai bavé pas vous mon amour, avant d'avoir eu vent de vous mon amour…_ French, lyrics from "La Javanaise" in the TSOW soundtrack. Translation: "I admit I went through hell, didn’t you my love? Before I caught wind of you, my love..."  
>  Other lyrics from “You’ll Never Know”, “That Old Black Magic” and, most of all, the Glen Miller Band's “I Know Why”.  
>  _Peri_ \- Persian folklore, a being between a fairy and an angel.


	6. The Garden of Deus Brânquia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tam comes face to face with the impossibilities of Elisa Esposito and Deus Brânquia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks and much appreciation to this chapter's beta reader, [bookscorpion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookscorpion/pseuds/bookscorpion)!

_Deus Brânquia continues down the jetty, its body a torch in the night, an infinite thing that Strickland, stupid man, believed he could make finite. Strickland tries anyway…_

* * *

Tam had not captured the gill-god.

Instead, she was pinning down a strange silver creature. Tears overflowed from its – her - disconcerting whiteless eyes. Save for those eyes, and the gills flaring from her slim, tender neck, she wore the face of Tam’s lifelong guilt.

Tam breathed, “Elisa... but... you’re dead... my father killed you...”

The unbelievable creature beneath Tam shook her head slightly. Surprise had loosened Tam’s grip enough that the being could move her hands. Could use one finger to brush the tip of Tam’s nose, a hard cheekbone, a decisive chin. Tracing the bulldog bones of Richard Strickland in her captor’s face.

The apparition’s eyes and Tam’s own widened with understanding at the same time. And they _moved_.

The Elisa-faced being tried to jerk away with her whole body, writhing and rolling, desperate to free herself. Tam’s lifetime instinct to arch over a smaller woman, giving her room to breathe, nearly let that happen.  Tam caught one wrist just in time, let the thing's own forward movement, trapped, snap her back to Tam. Tam levered onto her knees, pulling her captive close.

Her grip had to be ruthless to hold onto a being who was barely possible. The bipedal limbs were covered in a silky skim of slime. Below her dead woman’s face, the creature was a scaly nymph, delicately proportioned, nipples and delta dark against her nearly silver-white front.

Tam dragged them both upright, her grip still unbroken. “ _Bruxa! Fantasma!_ White Lady! _You_ did all this to me! To us! I don’t know what you are, but you’re wearing Elisa’s face to fuck with me.”

Tam shook the thing until her dark, lank hair flew. “It ends here! The ghosts – my father – the men I’ve killed - make it stop. Make it fucking stop!”

Tam knew beyond doubt her mind had been violated by this Elisa-faced force. For she understood Tam flawlessly, despite Tam shouting in English. Otherworldly power, a spirit of place, in Tam’s very arms, and it was sheer hell. A goddess should be sunlight, soft skin, eternal beauty like Hosna. Not this thing sliding in the dark, half-alluring, half-grotesque, all her father’s warning in the flesh.

_Deus Brânquia is merciful. But his girlfriend’s a fucking bitch._

“You’re the damn girlfriend, aren’t you? You’re with Deus Brânquia!”

The Elisa-nymph’s whiteless eyes widened. Lighting up with a smile of wild importance, she nodded. Tam could have sworn she mouthed _fuck you_. Then she feinted in to bite at Tam’s hand clenching her left wrist. Was everything out for her fingers? Tam gave that left wrist a cracking clench, then let it go to scoop up the machete. Seeing it got the thing in the mood to run, but Tam still had one of her wrists. It turned into a moment’s dance, complete with music still ringing away. Tam’s arm jerked out long, then dragged back, her furious strength enough to pull the thing off her slippery feet.

Tam raised the machete in her free hand. “You want to live? Then summon him! Summon Deus Brânquia. I need him.”

Tam’s captive went still, vast eyes drinking her in, fear deepening. She mouthed soundlessly. Before Tam could figure out how to get her to break her strange silence, the sky above the clearing both darkened, full night falling, and opened, drenching them in a downpour.

Her captive's face lit up anew with terrible joy. Instantly, she placed two fingers against her fine lips and wolf-whistled, piercingly. For one second, Tam was back in an asphalt Baltimore schoolyard. She snarled and was back in the jungle glade with the power that had stolen Elisa’s face, was picking out Tam’s own fears and memories.

The Elisa-nymph started shaking her head, eyes begging silently. She ran her free hand across her throat, a speechless curse of death, mouthing another word, _No_ , all of this again and again. Tam inhaled before shouting at her to stop – and caught a heavy, out-of-place smell. Brine and fruit and something almost sexual, strong enough to cut the rain. The scent of Deus Brânquia.

Tam turned, and –

He was there.

His name fell away before the living, fluid reality of him. No photograph had captured his vivid power. His blazing bioluminescence turned the night rain into sheets of light. He was the Devonian, four hundred million years sliding off his iridescent scales like the sustaining rain. A flicker of a pharyngeal jaw hinted at his endless future, made him alien. The immortal, the monster of monsters, darkening his lights as he approached. Dimming himself to be tanifa, swamp thing, the cryptid humanity knew was out there all along. The consuming scaled other, the snake, the frog, the fish feared yet by the shrew-neurons inside every mammal. No wonder he had haunted his hunters into madness. They had been fighting their own instincts all the way.

Tam’s heart pounded in monkey terror. With her free hand, she tried to sheathe the machete, missed, let it fall. Scrabbling for her pistol, she got a paintbrush instead – and remembered. Being in Giles Dupont’s studio, years back. She’d looked twice at an abstract figure study despite it being some man. A vastly idealized swimmer, male yet neutral, curtained in rainbow iridescence like this rain. Giles had lied with his words but never with his art. He’d been shouting to the whole damn world he’d seen this creature, its luminous, layered, monstrous beauty.

Remembering, Tam exulted. Now that he was there, he would be conquered. By her, out of anyone, with her father’s fight and her mother’s luck and the strength she’d had to have to live her life. Huntress, heritor, chosen one. The one with the secret weapon. The same thing that had tamed this monster for Giles.

Tam raised the Elisa-creature’s captive wrist and smiled. “Hi.”

“Stay where you are! Right there!” Tam pointed the paintbrush. She’d been an idiot to not seize the others’ tranquilizers, the spear gun. Yet what she held would bring Deus Brânquia to heel more than anything: this forest mystery who had molded herself to be what he desired.

Deus Brânquia’s breath heaved, gills shifting at the smell of oil paint. He made a querying marine noise. Tam’s captive writhed. Tam glared at her. Between one glance and the next, the female mimic had gone from the uncanny valley to practically human, compared to the monster before them.

Tam pressed her wrist again. “You understand me. Make him understand me, too. Nod for yes!” The Elisa-nymph nodded, clinging yet to lost Elisa’s silence.

Tam whirled back to Deus Brânquia. Watching their exchange, he’d gone bigger, venting his gills, flexing knotty muscles to widen his shoulders. His lights were extinguished except for his hypnotic golden eyes. He vented a land-breath. Absurdly, the retro music was still going, dubbing him a voice courtesy of Frank Sinatra.

 _… the way you haunt my dreams, no, no they can't take that away from me_ _…_

“Hey, there. Hey. I’m going to need you to come with me.” Tam dragged the Elisa-thing in. “You and she – you’re together, aren’t you? She must really like you, to do all this.” Tam hoisted the other female’s wrist high, pulling her onto her toes. Her captive’s free right hand was flailing frantically, trying to lever herself free, it seemed, without daring to hit Tam.

Deus Brânquia was beginning a low, extended growl, gills spreading. That suited Tam’s purpose, even as it gave her a stab. An animal, rapt in love, helpless despite its strength. Up close, he wasn’t that much taller or larger than she was. About the size of her brother.

“You don’t like that I’ve got her. It’s hell, isn’t it? You come with me and I let her go. It’s that simple. She can go – “ Tam’s voice went raw, thinking of Hosna - “Anywhere she wants in this whole damn world. I don’t need her. I need you.”

Tam tossed the paintbrush aside to hold out that hand, the way she introduced herself to a new dog. “It’ll be different, this time. It’ll be all right. Nobody will hurt – you won’t feel a thing. Not for a while.”

Deus Brânquia was slightly crouching, lowering his center of gravity enough to look her in the eyes. His gill-vents shifted. His growl shifted to a deep, watery purr, gazing past her to the Elisa-creature. Frank Sinatra drew out his final lyric, _nooooo, they can’t take that a-way…from…me…._

“You killed those men back there. With your claws or – whatever it is you do. You owe me. I have –” Tam realized he was replying. His huge hands were lifting in slow signs. Pointing at her. At himself. Clashing two massive fists together, like boulders. Opening them. Pointing behind her, his hands slicing complications in the air.

Tam glanced back. Behind her, Deus Brânquia’s mistress was weaving a spell with her free hand. Keeping him tamed for fear of her own life, Tam decided, giving the narrow wrist she held high a final crush. “Does he understand?” Hard-faced, her captive nodded.

Vibrating, ready for the next fight, Tam dug her free left hand into the apron. Gun or gyves? She chose the gyves, with their little remote device beside them, for locking and unlocking, shocking and relieving. It was about to be time.  Deus Brânquia was repeating his series of gestures, beckoning in with his hands.

“All right! Let’s do this.” Tam gave the Elisa-thing a good, final, disorienting shake and spun her aside, away. As she did, she leapt forwards to seize one of Deus Brânquia’s wrists.

She’d been so intoxicated with her strength and power, wrangling the frail nymph, that the spread of his swimmer’s arm bones was a shock. Tam sunk in her thumb for a nerve pinch and – nothing. Tam flashed back to what Preston had said _: flesh full of oils and fluids for buoyancy, and for its weird nervous system, too._ She wasn’t hurting him. Deus Brânquia was treating it like a handshake to return, wrapping his webs and claws around her, Tam’s strong, wide hand shrinking in his massive grip. 

It wasn’t a jerk, it was the most fluid of pulls that drew her in, yanked her up. Deus Brânquia hauled Tam by her right arm. His arms were longer than hers, and Tam’s feet were off the ground, her face nose to nose with him, her whole body tensed to keep her arm in its socket. He shook her, as bluntly as she’d rattled the Elisa-thing. And, at last, Deus Brânquia roared, right in her face, venting cold algae like he carried a sea primeval inside of him.

Tam, teeth gritted, kept her eyes locked to his. Stare him down, brazen this out, outlast his – bluff? No. No bluff. Tam felt hot liquid tracing down her right arm, glanced. There was blood. His claws had razored her right wrist so finely, she’d barely noticed.

As she looked back, his other hand grabbed her chin, turned her to his eyes. His noise was somewhere between a growl and an ocean’s roar, yet his face, his Greek statue’s mouth, seemed…amused. With his webbed thumb, he repeated the Elisa-being’s gesture, touching Tam’s nose, brushing her chin. The seconds he took to do it let Tam shake out the gyves with her one free hand. All she needed was one of his wrists.

His touch was lingering, as if she weighed less than a child, as if time meant nothing. Fuck, if _he_ remembered Tam’s father, saw his bones - the gyves had to be on _now_ – as Tam thought it, his thicker slime brushed her lips.

And she knew what Deus Brânquia tasted like: cold transparence, mud-tinged rain, fruit and brine, and

 _they were here when this was one river one land the world_ ' _s heart they swam knew it swamp, knew it salty, plant-bitter, thickly warm, crystal cool, all of it loved, other creatures growing shrinking existing dying staying, always loved loved loved, until the two-legs changed it all, river people, the worst the wanderers, the pale coats, metal hands and electric pains, cruel enough to teach them time, they have learned to act upon these ones or else_

Tam staggered. She was, suddenly, back on the ground. No. _No._ He was like the Elisa-witch – inside her mind -

_they are home here unendingly strong no fear life flowing perceiving all the jungle gods at once, river land bog sand flower-color bark-color roach-color leaf-color, they gaze down at a haggard mad-eyed two-legs, so strange, this one is a woman yet the familiar smell, her bones, her pain, does she ache or hate, so hard to tell when her energy has such wrongness, too close to the woman they love but their woman knows and shares her knowing and says_

Tam swayed on her feet, gasping to feel Deus Brânquia’s vast thick-slimed hand over her face, his other hand cupping the flat of one shoulder, syrupy music from the boom box making this, again, some dance. It came to her, too late. This was what she’d asked for. Deus Brânquia was giving himself to her – pouring his vast mind inside her - the Elisa-force hadn’t been in her head at all, not compared to –

 _this world this richness this explosion of perception this vast this constant overwhelming awareness a thousand million neurons every one in use, going back going forwards, the cruelty of what it is to know time_ _’s passage - Deus Br_ _ânquia hooks it to her, a trace of her own milky child-scent on a bad man_ ' _s coat, a white stone with the scratch-signs their woman makes rarely, her life and her death parsed down to a pain-memory and a blink in the perceptions of this eternal being_

At this vision of her own gravestone, Tam flicked back to herself again. She was going down, someone easing the way like she’d caught Diosa, her face slid on slime and muscle and she jerked away because -

 _she sees herself through that fish-eye transcendence_ _– everything wrong about her - a child unworthy of a beloved animal - a terror dealing a thousand cruelties well before her monstrous culmination, the strikes her body hungers to deal out yet, deaths of pure waste, not even rot for this forest, endless fault failure separation, more failure that through her mind_ ' _s incontinence this animal innocent this godly monster this witnessing multitude battening at her soul knows too_ _– and recognizes_

The pain of it and Tam’s body were one. But before she ripped at herself to loose the agony under her skin, Tam felt hands. Strong wet mats wrapping her arm, her lower back as she coiled, fetal. Small fingers on her wrists, next to her raised hands, trying to keep her from shredding the face over her father’s bones. A woman’s palm brushed Tam’s lips, an accident and yet –

 _it_ ' _s respite, the parting lips, the sparking kiss, the single heartbeat, the breath that brings in, one petal_ ' _s worth of permeability turns a tide  
_

_and this thing that cups her is the garden around, the forest about, underwater abovewater, the salt marsh's sweep, the delta-sand's vulva, the elegant dessication, the mineral depths, the blended edges, the shimmering crawling constant shift of life in the world, the vast the constant awareness, the explosion of perception smoothed into a flood, amidst its rush she is diminished, gladly_

_this had to have destroyed every man who_ ' _d come close, their carapaces of masculinity shattered, soft inner selves battered by this Hokusai-wave, this would_ ' _ve been a nuclear blast force inside her father_

 _this was nearly the ruin of her as a woman, hard on the bulwark of her, battening her brittle determination to endure, stand her ground, do what needed doing, not in a shell but frozen furious to the core, performing so much no real self remained, all of it sucked away into armor_ _– almost all_

 _she had to be the other thing, what her father would have killed her for - perverse, in-between, outsider, lover - to let the flood in and feel, the current piercing as a lover's_ _hand, rideable like a lover_ _’s body, the flow of it on and on and on, the blissful terrifying defiant jouissance of the world_

_amidst the flood of it, the gill god shimmers, focuses, returns to what they recognize about her, something dark and hot, the great wave cups her gently to flush around it, to tear from her the machete-cut, the anchor-strike, the electric-shock, sugar stolen from her father, what it was to rage and fear and kill beyond need, riptided away into the shapefree water_

_she cries out its loss with a primate_ ' _s howl, it was twined through her nerves her blood her mind, addictively sweet, and who would she be, now? how to fight and live? yet as her mind grieves her animal self arcs, alive within her, remembering what she knew as a child full of yearning, ready to swing from branch to branch to run swim fly for joy and life_

 _in the leap, recognition, company. Albi_ _’s laugh, Xono_ _’s sleek sternness, Ovindho_ _’s trill, not three but four long-haired cats, sliding along her, through her and through Deus Br_ _ânquia and each other, a wordless bellylaugh that had to be Henriquez Senior, a cultivated voice saying -_ unity in multiplicity _– the translator, making it clearer as his words limited and divided_

_who else is in the depths of Deus Br_ _ânquia's divine flow? her mother Diosa her lost brother? she'd have to dive to feel them, so far there might be no surfacing no return_

_on the cusp_ _– stay or go_ _– feel or know_ _–_

 _a hiss from the darkness at the back of her skull, low and envious:_ Don’t fuck this up.

_her mind braces in defense, shaping back towards words, and she knows -_

She opened her eyes.

She was curled up in the loamy tangle of a forest floor, half-entwined in some saplings. For a long moment, she stared at the entrancing net of rot beneath her. It glowed softly in its peaceful, even progress towards more life.

 _Make it stop,_ she’d cried.

For the first time since she'd been ten, it had.

It was raining again. She exhaled, a full-body heave. Snot and tears were soothed off her face by the rain. The longer parts of her hair were wrapping around her face like water-weeds. Shakily, she brushed the lankness away, mind tottering to full alertness.

Tam remembered she had a name. She closed her eyes, opened them again. Levered to half-sitting and looked around. Shook her head, and groaned, because everything was limned with a frail aura. Near her feet, the boom box coruscated violently, its batteries glowing ultraviolet. She had felt how Deus Brânquia experienced the world: now, eyes open, she saw it with his vision.

That could not have been real. Deus Brânquia must have a chemical defense in his skin. Nice job of it, too, to induce the most spectacular wish-fulfillment hallucination of all time –

Something more than Tam’s vision remained animal-sharp. She smelled blood. Hadn’t she been cut earlier? No? Maybe? Her right wrist was strangely immaculate, and this blood-scent was intimately familiar.

Tam shifted the apron. She had been on the countdown to menopause, months without a period. Not anymore. Whatever Deus Brânquia had done had sent painless blood seeping through her rain-soaked trousers. Shielded by the apron, Tam worked between her legs. Her hand came out not just bright with blood but cupping rounded, rooted chunks of pale tissue. Ew. She felt she should be angry about this. Yet the distinct white spark of rage wasn’t igniting to short-circuit her thoughts.

Tam shook her fingers clean in the fading spate of rain. There had been Preston’s idea, back at the start, that the healing found in Deus Brânquia might get rid of an affliction he had no right to know about: her uterine fibroids. Deus Brânquia had cut out the middleman. His effect on her body was real. On her mind, too. As for everything else…

Tam looked over her shoulder. Behind her, the glade was brilliantly lit by a pair of bioluminescent beings. Deus Brânquia and his mate, the Elisa-spirit and her partner. Two scaled beings tight against each other, swaying slightly as they stood. The Elisa-being was sheltered by the piscine divine, melting against his shoulder. The embrace was radiant with shared healing light, blue and gold. The plants reached towards them, sent their petals and the raindrops they cupped down to caress them. A thousand moths fluttered, dizzied by their love.

Tam thought about the lifelong journey that had brought her to this beautiful strangeness. A path strewn with wife-beating and murder, greed and blackmail, pride and anger, intoxication and madness, more murder and suicide. 

She knew, at last, it wasn’t her and Hosna against the embracing pair. It could not be, with the world still turning. Springing back, again and again, in the vast cycles of time Deus Brânquia somehow embodied. There was no way to share what she felt in her bones, had seen in her own blood, and sound sane: that Deus Brânquia truly was a god. And needed to stay so, for the world’s sake.

To say that to the powers that were, with some mayfly extension of humanity possible, was doomed to failure. Tam had seen what that possibility had sown in the microcosm of the _Guilhermino_. How they had savaged themselves, in their own increasing terror of the divine and unspeakable.

She tilted her face to sweep rain away, coming to terms with the horror of what she'd almost done, what she was about to do.

She had to be strong enough to fail, now. To fuck this up. Spectacularly.  

There was a slight pause in the music. It began again, that first sad, plangent song. _J'avoue j'en ai bav_ _é pas vous mon amour_ _–_

Tam reached over to the boom box and pressed STOP.

Record-scratch. Mike-drop. Both the divine beings turned and stared at, Tam was sure, this shrew interrupting their existence. The Elisa-nymph flung herself in front of Deus Brânquia, brandishing Tam’s machete. Deus Brânquia tried to shoulder in front of her, beginning another snarl, but his mate was determined to protect him.

Tam held up her hands. She had to talk to them – at least to the one who understood her. “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I'll go, if you’ll let me.”

Deus Brânquia braced, as if Tam was a chained dog that might or might not attack. But the Elisa-spirit lowered the machete. She cupped a hand and, glimmering silver against Deus Brânquia’s glowing defensiveness, she gestured to Tam.

Tam levered herself further upright, dazzled by that electrum forgiveness. She said, for it felt important, "Deus Brânquia…um…White Lady… Henríquez was sorry, too. His daughter Diosa, as well.” The more Tam strung words together, the more the forest’s aura thinned out, dimming.

The silver-white nymph tiptoed closer, Deus Brânquia flowing behind. Staying at arm’s length, she flipped up something from the ground: the notebook, on top of the lucky bag. She shoved an open page right in Tam’s face.

I AM ELISA

The writing was shaky, clumsy, half-forgotten. Tam peered over the notebook. She read it again.

I AM ELISA

“Fuck,” Tam said. She rocked up to kneel on both knees. “You…what? You survived?”

Elisa bestowed a solemn nod, disrupted by a smile of pure mischief.

Through the last of Deus Brânquia’s sight, that smile was a weapon of destruction. To see it was to be smitten. Tam found herself in the grip of a giddy insta-crush on this exquisite, ferocious gamine. Small wonder her father had had a thing for Elisa, if he’d been dealing with Deus Brânquia.

Laughing loosely, Tam rocked back onto her ass, knees akimbo, resting her elbows on them. “He didn’t kill you. He didn’t kill either of us.”

The notebook, again.

I SAID NOT TO

“Not Deus Brânquia. I meant my father.” Tam hadn’t expected any pity for this, yet that emotion flooded Elisa’s face. Tam turned away, abashed, until the notebook’s pages rustled again.

YOU NOT KILL YOURSELF

Tam wasn’t sure if that was a plea or an observation. “Does that happen a lot? When people meet, uh, him.”

Elisa nodded, very sadly. She gestured out into the forest, where Tam knew human corpses rested. Then, she scrawled anew, her whole hand curled around Tam’s pen, a young soul re-learning writing.

WHY?

As Elisa held that out, her lashes fluttered. Oh, God. Tam had to answer after that.

“Deus Brânquia, he’s. They’re. Kind of a trip. It was hard to…see what I was. And, then, to come away. Be separate again.” Tam winced, reliving both that shit-show of shame and tearing herself from the transcendence beyond it.

Elisa weighed this and sighed, deep and silent.

“Deus Brânquia…he healed, um, something wrong with me…did he do this to you? Change you?” If this was Elisa, she couldn’t talk with words. Tam stood up. It was easier to avert her eyes from Elisa’s compelling figure that way.

Elisa was smiling, nodding, raising her arm with happy grace, like every silver scale shimmering there was an engagement diamond. She tapped her gilled throat, her darkened eyes, ready for the water and the night.

It said something that Tam had forgotten Deus Brânquia was there for a full minute. He towered beside Elisa, proud and protective, gazing at her like she was the world’s most amazing genius for writing with intense concentration. Tam leaned in to read one name:

GILES?

Elisa, quivering with hopeful significance, pointed to the lucky bag.

Tam gaped, understanding. That bag was why she was still alive. “He’s, he’s not here. An artist gave that bag, but not to me. To my mother. She worked at an ad agency in Baltimore for a while.” Elisa was nodding, signing something that had to mean yes, yes, yes.

“Did Giles work there, too? _He_ was the artist!” An hour ago, Tam would have railed at her absent-minded, flaky mother. Now, she looked down at her muddied knees. “I can see why he gave something to her. My mother was a very nice person…” _Not,_ Tam thought, _like me._ “Did you see the bag and think Giles was here?”

Elisa pointed at the bag, then at the terrible canvas. She shrugged, waving her uncertainty. Tam guessed this meant _maybe_. How long had all this been spinning together? Could anything else have drawn Elisa out?

Elisa pointed back at Tam, then gestured out, clearly wanting some answers. Tam looked at the sad canvas, knocked over in the scuffling. She picked it up. Being rained on had actually improved the artwork. “Painting? I tried.”

Elisa screwed up her mouth.

Tam huffed, “Who made you an art critic – Giles. _Giles Dupont_ did.” Tam couldn’t argue with that qualification. She pointed to the little female figure on the canvas. “Is this part okay, at least?”

Elisa took it in, raised her trickster’s eyebrows and waved her hand.

Tam propped the canvas against a large cymbidium orchid at the glade’s edge. “I did meet Giles, one time. In his studio.”

This earned Tam a quick arm-grab. Tam had a moment to recover from Elisa’s touch while Elisa signed to Deus Brânquia. Deus Brânquia shrilled with interest, lit up in racing blue lines. Elisa didn’t have to sign or write to telegraph her urgency.

Tam told the small story. “He was good. He was really well. He’d done well as an artist, was in this house in upstate New York…” Tam, very newly out then, had wondered if Giles was gay or if that was wishful thinking. The later 70s had shown he sure was. He had definitely been one of the nicest men she’d ever met, kind to her as a young woman, so proud and callow, ashamed of her father killing Elisa. He’d even been patient with Tam’s surly brother. It made sense that he’d ridden out whatever wave Deus Brânquia had brought him, that the true self left after that was gentle yet strong.

Elisa resorted to more writing. ZEL?

“Zelda was there too, in the same house. I remember her because she told me, never trust a man. I told her I didn’t plan to.”

Elisa clapped her hands, jubilant, with a little dancing leap. Oh, she was happy. Tam had to turn away. Elisa shoved the notebook back in Tam’s face.

TELL THEM WE ARE GOOD?

“Um. How long have you been here? How much time?”

Elisa shrugged, smiled blithely.

“Deus Brânquia escaped in 1962. I visited them in 1973. It’s 2006 now. I think it’s been…forty-four years.”

Elisa’s mouth made a perfect O.

“Yeah. So, uh, you think they’d still be alive?”

Elisa shook her head. Deus Brânquia, was uttering marine noises and flashing, gathering his hands to himself again. Tam wasn’t sure if that meant he’d gathered them into…whatever it was he had access to. There was a contrary vibe about him.

This talk about dates and times, it didn’t feel good, exactly. But it did make her feel like Tamara Caldwell again. She drank in Elisa’s liveliness and innocence, this last moment of being trusted.

It was time to fail.

“Do you know why I came here?”

Elisa met Tam’s eyes, pointed at her, then spun a finger around one ear. She pointed to Deus Brânquia, still looming and luminous. For the second time, she reached up and tapped Tam’s chin, the bones she shared with her father. Deus Brânquia made a strange noise, like he was trying to mimic something electric.  

Tam held up her hands. “I’m not saying I wasn’t…unbalanced when I got here.” Elisa folded her arms, with a tilt of her head that managed to be sarcastic.

“It was nothing to do with my father. Nothing I wanted. Do you remember Occam?”

Elisa’s sass melted into sickened fear.

“They’re back. And they were on the hunt for him. For Deus Brânquia. It is two thousand and six and they are ready to take him apart like never before.”

Deus Brânquia sensed Elisa’s terror. He inhaled to hiss, began to swell, but Elisa reached to him. She signed something. He settled back. But the playful god Tam had glimpsed briefly was gone, replaced by a watchful, eternal predator.

Now for it, Tam thought: now to pull everything down to the point of no return. “You need to hide better. There’s some changes to technology, to science, that make you easier to find. Can I tell you?”

Elisa was still frozen, facing some internal darkness. It was Tam’s turn to reach for the lucky bag. She dug inside it.

“To start with…this is a phone now.” She unflipped her brother’s gift, the Motorola Razr. It still had enough charge left that its tiny color screen was alight, if frozen in place.

Elisa’s eyes went so wide Tam caught the tiniest glimpse of whites at last. She snatched the phone away and showed it to Deus Brânquia. Together, they marveled over it. Tam stepped closer: Deus Brânquia was playing with the tiny screen. When he pressed one finger-pad against it, it went black and purple. Entranced, he lifted the digit to look at multicolored static, then pressed down again. Disruptive energies, indeed. Tam bid goodbye to everything in that cellphone’s memory.

Questions about the sacrificed phone – “It doesn’t work here in Brazil. But a phone, uh, bought here does” – segued into Tam giving Elisa the worst science lesson ever. If Preston had been alive to be turned inside-out by Deus Brânquia, he’d have done it a hundred times better. Tam did what she could to tell Elisa about traps and tranquilizers. Tracking transponders and GPS and infra-red night-vision goggles. Satellite imagery and sonar. Elisa grasped all of those quickly. Tam was relieved that she believed what she was being told about satellites. But, then, she had worked at the first Occam.

Tam took it back to the phone. “It’s got a camera inside.” She had to explain digital cameras after that, repeating how some people had them united in their phones, with the latest 2006 models. Maybe everyone would, soon.

“So someone can see you, take lots of pictures, and send them to someone as soon as they get to a computer. Or see you and call someone else right away, not have to get to a phone or a, a phone booth. These things just get faster – ” Tam stopped. Elisa’s expression was collapsing again. Deus Brânquia was lifting his gills and hissing softly.

“Can you move from here?”

They consulted each other in their tacit language of signs and glances. Elisa scrawled:

MOVE AND SLEEP. LONG SLEEP

“Hibernate! Yes!”

Elisa brushed her eyes and glanced around at all the flowers. Deus Brânquia cupped her to him again. Tam realized this miraculous garden had been sown from his life force, a gift for Elisa. How strange it was to be here. Perhaps she wasn't sane now, to be talking to them like this.

A roar that was not Deus Brânquia tore the air. Tam realized where it had come from, took another drop back into her crueler reality. “The others – shit – I need to check on them.”

Elisa ran a hand across her throat.

Tam winced. “I know they’re dead, but, their bodies…”

Tam left the glade for the jungle hiding spots where the others had died. Her bare feet squelched in boggy ground and loam. Elisa laced through the saplings after her, light-footed as a ghost. Deus Brânquia, here in his saturated home, seemed to glide, plants shifting, reality adjusting slightly for him.

Albi was…gone. Tam saw traces of a heavy drag through the forest floor, towards the river. And its caimans. The net of Amazon rivers had one of its beginnings where he was from, Iquitos. She picked up Albi's straw hat. When it dried, she’d brush the mud off it.

Xono’s breakdown was near-complete. Tam saw the magnificent shadow that had ruptured the graying night. Seeing her in turn, a huge jaguar roared, batted Xono’s half-flensed skull into its jaws, bounded away. Well. Tam didn’t think any burial in Santa Isabel could top that, especially for Xono. A piece of metal gleamed in the light of Deus Brânquia. Tam plucked Xono’s nose jewelry up from a leaf that cupped it.

Joe was untouched. All three hundred-ish pounds of him. Tam looked at the revived Elisa to ask, shakily, “Can Deus Brânquia make him live again? Like you did?”

Deus Brânquia, unusually, responded with a gesture. His hands pushed out. Meanwhile, Elisa was shaking her head, mouthing a word simple enough that Tam could make it out. _Gone._

There had been no sense of Joe in the multiplicity tapped by Deus Brânquia. Or of Tam’s mother, Elaine, or of Diosa, who both had churches, husband’s graves, to draw them. “That…makes sense. He’s not from here. Where he's from, it’s beautiful, like here, but it’s different –” Tam thought of one of the sacred places she’d been brought to by ethics clients. A spar of island land, plunging like a green dragon into a windswept sea. A place where, it was said, souls from that island transitioned from the land to an ocean underworld. Not the only place of its kind.

Tam was startled to feel, again, a trickle of Deus Brânquia’s mind-self: _cold water salt water deep water._ As that chilled her, he voiced something like a whale’s cry. For an instant, Tam hoped, remembering a world’s worth of myths and legends. “Are there more like you?”

Elisa took this one, shaking her head. She folded a hand over one of Deus Brânquia’s massive forearms, and pointed twice. It was just him and her.

Yet again, Elisa pointed at Tam. She pressed hands over her heart, evoking its beat, and pointed at Joe.

“Did I love him?” Tam found herself cool, free of temper, at that. “Not like you two. But I should take him back to our boat.” Oh, she’d prevented another Strickland, at this terrible price. Maybe it should’ve been the price her family paid, back in 1962. 

Elisa stared at her hard. Tam wasn’t sure if the transformed Elisa had any mind-reading going on, anything but her own indomitable, compelling self. After a moment, something deserved Elisa trailing back to where she’d left the notebook, the effort of writing.

OCCAM MAD?

Tam opened her mouth, closed it. “Yeah.”

COME BACK?

HELP HIM

Not us: him.

With this, Elisa flipped the notebook closed to caress the arm she’d shown off before with one hand, then point at Tam. Elisa had taken her measure and decided to put up with her to protect Deus Brânquia. Deus Brânquia vented a rippling watery sigh that bespoke infinite sadness. He brushed Elisa, then supported her by extending one monstrous, magnificent hand to Tam. Deus Brânquia’s face and stance, offering, forgiving, sublimely beautiful, transcended the gender Occam had assigned this being.

Tam reeled. This was the apotheosis of her longing for the divine. Deus Brânquia’s luminous presence would soothe where all the capillaries of rage had been ripped out of her. Elisa – Tam certainly wasn’t thinking straight around her. This sacrificial gamine, a reborn goddess, was tapping into all the yearnings Tam had about adoring and protecting women. In their rainforest company, she’d dodge Occam’s inevitable revenge. For one scathing, tempting, transgressive moment, Tam pictured herself in both their arms. 

Jolted, Tam pulled herself together. She was soaked to the skin, her nails cracking and filthy. Something itched unpleasantly. She would have to follow through on that arm-gesture, do Elisa’s change, too, to keep up with them in jungles and rivers. Her whole being just said no to that. She was too human. Elisa must have had a different seed of otherness in her than Tam’s, something fey and strange, to dance into the deeps with Deus Brânquia so fully and sweetly. Maybe if they’d been _drier_ gods.

And Tam already had a drylands goddess, a white-clad witch, a ravishing sphinx, a self-exiled princess. Someone whose presence was as much its own thought-bending, heart-wrenching force as Elisa’s. Who needed rescuing more than ever, now.

Tam said, “I don’t know if I can help more than I already have.” And, “There is somebody back in America. I’m afraid for her – for us. I need to try to help her.” Tam left it at that, uncertain if she was sparing herself or Elisa by saying no more.

Elisa melted instantly, eyelashes fluttering, smile sweet. She was, suddenly, very human, the way she radiated being in love with love.

YOU WILL

With this, Elisa handed the notebook and pen back to Tam with a palpable sense of relief. Like it had hurt her, vaguely, to use such things, that she was glad she’d never need them again.

“Thanks.” Tam tucked the now-soggy paper into the damp bag. Her discarded, muddy hiking shoes were here. She forced them back on. This done, she turned towards her first step of departure: Joe’s body. The cool, wet night meant his body remained pliable enough that she could lay him out. Tam was back to her own self enough to scruff bark down over his death-mark on the tree, hiding the darkening gore.

Tam caught Elisa opening her hands in what Tam now thought of as the “WTF” gesture. Tam replied, “Like I said, I’m taking him back. It’s important." Two degrees in archaeology, twenty-five professional years, often dealing with burial sites, and it had never been this important before. "I can use the easel as a sledge to…well…I have to try.” 

Elisa turned away, hands busy. Deus Brânquia made one of his noises. He flowed to the other side of the body to bend with a matador’s grace. Those huge webbed hands were equal to Joe’s sleeping strength. Lifting him, cradling him, Deus Brânquia exhaled. Yet another downpour began, water over scales visibly banking the gill-god’s muscles with power. Elisa gestured.

Tam’s throat swelled. “This way…”

They came to the slender path out of the glade. Tam let the gill-god and the new goddess by his side lead the way. She trailed after, drinking in this tanifa of tanifas starting the dead man’s journey home. She, too, was grateful for the rain. It covered the tears rilling down her face at Deus Brânquia’s mercy.

Their progress was too short. When they arrived at the path’s end, the water, itself, _shifted_. As Deus Brânquia expanded his gills, the water sank away so that the skiff, staked four meters out, suddenly nosed a water-edge. Deus Brânquia strode across the beached greenery to rest the man’s body lengthwise in the skiff.

There was a tap at Tam’s elbow. Elisa, again. Lips parted, eyes sweet yet sad, she made an OK sign.

Tam swallowed mucus to speak. “It’s good. Thank you. I have…no idea what happens next. Just run.”

With that secret-weapon smile again, Elisa shook her head. She dove her hands out in front of her. They’d swim.

With that, Tam tore herself away from the ever-living to the dead. The verdure at the water’s edge was not a pliant carpet for her: she churned and waded and flung herself into the skiff. When she was in, the water rose around it anew.

With the skiff loosed, Tam looked back once. The two lovers had fallen into each other’s embrace again. This time, they were waist-deep in the water: Elisa had gone to Deus Brânquia where he stood. The rising flood curved around them, sheltering them. Flowers that had died in the cool of the night fluttered down. The first light of dawn hadn’t come yet, but they didn’t need it, Deus Brânquia luminous once more.

Peeking around Deus Brânquia’s shoulder, Elisa watched Tam with one knowing eye.

Deus Brânquia was merciful. He would have let Tam choose death without judgement, taken her in. His girlfriend, loving and forgiving as only a goddess could be, had kept Tam alive. Given her choices. Which meant Tam had to deal with everything she’d done.

Yes, Deus Brânquia was merciful. But his girlfriend…

Tam shivered to her bones. And rowed.

* * *

_Elisa feels no hate for the woman; she realizes that, down here, hate has no purpose. Down here, you embrace your foes until they become your friends. Down here, you seek not to be one being, but all beings, and all at once, God and Chemosh and everything in between._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Final quote here is also from the _Shape of Water_ novel.


	7. A River Story

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the survivors, life and death blur one final time to keep Deus Brânquia’s secrets.

_Strickland feels opened. It isn’t a bad feeling. He has been closed to too much, he thinks, and for too long… It is the end. But he laughs as he dies. Because it is also the beginning._

* * *

In the black, watery wilderness, beneath yet another overcast night, the _Guilhermino_ _’s_ one light was a beacon. The tubby bulk of the boat's silhouette promised shelter. Relief.

Tam wrested the skiff next to the riverboat’s side ladder. Mist was beginning to rise from the midnight river. She’d made it back before losing visibility. A sling and winch were waiting: intended for Deus Brânquia, perfect for swinging Joe’s body on board.  After tying the skiff to the ladder, Tam gave Joe’s shoulder a pat. “Right. Let’s get you home.”

Someone above said, muffled, “ _Que?_ _”_

Tam said, “It’s me, Yaní. _Soy Tamara._ _”_

 _“Con outros?_ _”_

 _“Solo_. Only me.” Alive, that was. The zone between Spanish and Portuguese was working so far.

“Can I see you?”

“Yes, yes,” Tam said. Poor thing. It hadn’t occurred to any of them, absorbed in the hunt, that it might frighten their cook to be left alone, stoic as she was. Tam stood carefully, leaning one hand on the _Guilhermino_ _’s_ ladder. With Tam’s height, her face was at deck level as she peered up, ready to meet Yaní’s curious hot-amber eyes. “See? It is me.”

Tam’s uplifted face was blinded by a vivid white flare, one of their LED work lights. “Ah!” She flung an arm in front of her eyes.  Her ears got it next, rattled by a fusillade of shots.

Yaní hit the deck lights. Tam saw, through phosphenes, Yaní’s silhouette lofting a small submachine gun, pointing up. The kind of gun where needing to aim was an afterthought. The shots woke the jungle to scream along with Yaní: “ _Where is Deus Br_ _ânquia?_ ”

Tam went at last for her pistol. But her shoulder-pat to Joe had slipped a touch of Deus Brânquia’s slime over her hand. The weapon slid out of her hand with a life of its own, hit the skiff’s edge, was lost to the water.

Yaní roared again, pointing the weapon down. “Where is Deus Brânquia?”

Tam reeled back, spread her hands. “He’s not here!”

“You lie! His grace is on you.”

What the hell did she mean by that? “He’s not coming. He’s not even staying here.” Tam found herself on her knees in the skiff, a fish in a barrel. “I won’t help you find him.”  

Yaní snarled, “You! Out of all, you! _Filha da Strickland!"_ She spat _Strickland's daughter_ like it was lower far than _filha da puta_. "Do you know what your father did here? On this river?”

“Oh, God,” Tam heard herself saying, in English. “Not you, too.”

Yaní growled slowly, simply. “1962. Strickland brought his men to my home. Killed a man to get weaker men to say where they had seen Deus Brânquia. Strickland had what he needed. One of us cursed him as a _corta cabeza_. He smiled to hear it. And had his soldiers kill all the men there, anyway. For the silence.”

“Fuck,” Tam breathed, aghast.

Yaní ranted at length, too quickly for Tam to catch her words. All Tam could pick out was the past tense, and blood, and death. Yaní ended with, “Now this! Why? Why you?”

Tam bowed her head. “To make it stop.”

In the silence that followed, water lapped the sides of both boats. Tam could hear Yaní stepping from side to side. Deciding. The hell of it stretched out. Tam inhaled mist and gunpowder, cold and hot. It would’ve been better to die in Deus Brânquia’s strange, cool embrace. To go down fighting for Hosna’s sake back in the States. To end it here, in-between…at least Joe’s body wouldn’t be alone in the skiff.

Yaní’s own breathing was labored. “Deus…Brânquia…is merciful.” She paused. “To you! Aaaaagh!” Again, shots ripped the night. But not the boat.

That cry, its enraged frustration: so familiar to Tam. It was followed by a click, a clatter. Yaní  had tossed an empty ammunition clip onto the deck. Tam’s whole being waited for a second click. The sound of Yaní reloading.

Instead, Yaní spoke. “I am a woman of this river. If you had succeeded, I would have poisoned you all and freed Deus Brânquia.”

Tam dared to look up as she asked, “Are you alone?”

Yaní said, “What can’t a woman do, alone?” Again, so familiar.

“Why didn’t you kill us before?” She’d had three chances a day.

Yaní said, “I am good at the wait. You kill yourselves off plenty. Those still alive: Deus Brânquia would decide.”

Tam bowed her head again. There was another thoughtful silence.

“You say you help with dishes.”

Tam swallowed. “Yes?” This was it. She was going to die because she hadn’t offered twice.

“Deus Brânquia sends you to me in an apron. And I hate to wash the dishes.” Yaní lowered the gun. “You steer the boat, you do the dishes, we do not curse or kill each other. We leave each other at Santa Isabel. I keep the boat.”

“ _Si, Sehnora._ Uh – curse?”

 Yaní only laughed, at length.

Tam thought of syndromes that had their own place and people, of her racing mind and physical misery. Maybe Yaní’s ill will had caused that. Enough and to spare had been their own damned faults. Besides, everything else…Tam looked back over her shoulder at the jungle, the river that held the impossible.

Yaní clicked her tongue. “You see the gill god, all right, to turn away from somebody armed. Get up here before I decide to kill a Strickland, after all.” She peered down. “The big boy, eh? How’d you get him in there?"

“Deus Brânquia was merciful.”

Yaní snarled with frustration once more, and moved to help.

* * *

A shaky hour later, Tam had done what she could for Joe. Once Joe was on board, Yaní had left her to it, neither helping nor stopping her.

In her cabin, Tam finally saw what Yaní had meant by _His grace is on you._ Overall, she looked like hell. Filthy, eyes hooded and sunken, face riven with exhaustion and bewilderment. But her hair, though lank, was shaggy, longer than it should have been. She thought of Tim, in their college days, calling her a hippie. And - maybe it was the night lights in the cabin - the color of her eyes had shifted. They were no longer a chill, edgeless gray-blue, but deeper, vivid as the wing of a morpho butterfly. Or one of Deus Brânquia’s more brilliant scales.

Tam kicked off her mud-caked shoes, her bloodstained trousers, and slumped into her bunk. She was too tired to clean up further. As she fell asleep, thinking wistfully of the loam in the garden of Deus Brânquia, she heard rain. A hammering downpour, dancing on the river and the decks. It drowned out the night's disrupted monkeys.

The rain didn’t let up for three days. Tam was busy from dawn to dusk. Get up, miss Hosna, check generators, wrest the boat down the current, anchor, check generators, do dishes, worry about Hosna. Rain sent the river high and restless. Tam’s shoulders ached from steering. Yaní continued to be uncanny, always having a meal ready exactly when Tam could face eating. Tam was mostly confident Yaní wouldn’t poison her, between the difficult river and her sour satisfaction at watching Tam scrub. She still started and went cold whenever Yaní caught her unawares. Her involuntary fear was, she knew, the least shadow of what her father had done to this river's people. Usually, it faded fast. She didn’t have time to breathe until the late evening.

That was when she sat vigil with the dead.

Joe had fit in the sarcophagus, just. Its green LEDs made his face a mask of jade: its red lights were now a warning. Tam had put as much salt in its water as possible, doing her best to brine him. She ran it on the coldest setting. Why did it have such a cold setting? What else was Occam planning to plunder? Him, Diosa, the other three: cold specimens all. Would Occam learn from them? What would they force out of her, when she showed back up? What would they do to Hosna – and herself?

At times, Tam paced the hold, planning. To buy some time, she'd unplugged every cable attached to the short-wave radio. She’d call lawyers, ask her Organization Man brother what he could do, beggar herself. She’d be up against a government machine that knew no decency but power. It consumed its soldiers, Willie and Joe and Strickland. It bought and paid for its scientists. Its arbitrary word, changing from year to year, made gentle, gifted Giles and free-spirited Hosna criminals. It enveloped the kind of monsters who’d kill pet cats to intimidate. One way or another, the fight would ruin her.

Other times, Tam thought about each of the dead: who they’d been, what they might have become. Albi and Xono…it would have been easy to say they were killed by Deus Brânquia. But there was more than one way to take an offered hand. They might have chosen to stay in Deus Brânquia’s multiplicity. Which would be far better than the others’ deaths. Willie, vivid Diosa, Preston and his untapped potential, all frankly murdered. Joe faltering where Tam so nearly had, in the dirty-water part of Deus Brânquia’s flow, where the gill-god learned what you were. Joe had been a good soldier to the last, infinitely better than Tam with a pistol. To his undoing.

Whatever she thought, whatever she sifted through, Tam did not cry. Not even when, hesitantly, she slipped in one of Joe’s earbuds and started his iPod to hear his music. It wasn’t what she expected.

_Got a wife and kids in Baltimore, Jack,_

_I went out for a ride and I never went back_

_Like a river that don't know where it's flowing,_

_I took a wrong turn and I just kept going_

_Everybody_ ' _s got a hungry heart_ _…_

The song made Tam think of her father. The way Richard Strickland had checked out of their family for the allure of Elisa – and something else. After coming out, Tam had heard other queer friends talk about their queer relatives. They found sense and comfort in bachelor uncles, eccentric aunts, cousins in San Francisco. Tam had always come up empty. Until now, reconsidering her rigid father.

 _I should_ ' _ve stayed where you are. Been the creature's creature..._

Richard Strickland had been openly obsessed with masculinity, military protocol, obedience. Enforcing normality. He’d experienced Deus Brânquia in the gill-god’s home territory, spent weeks with him in transit. What truths had Deus Brânquia torn from him? Had he been fighting against his own desire for the monstrous, the other? The too-similar? The unspeakable? It felt inevitable that Elisa’s uncanny charm would draw Strickland. Her grace and silence must have seemed a relief, a dream of compromise.

Tam would never know.  

When she slept, she did not dream of him, or of anything.

The fourth evening, it all hit at last. Tam had been casting out the bow anchor. At the spot in the prow where she’d gone into those terrible, seductive trances, she looked into the water. Four days of rain had made the river coffee-brown, opaque with silt. A tangle of epiphytes and orchids floated by, torn from some tree, beautiful and battered. They were sucked under by an eddy of water.

Very suddenly, Tam burst into tears. She hurled the anchor, dragged it until something caught, then bent over the railing. There was no healing flood here to sweep away what the vanishing orchids, and fifteen kilos of steel in her hands, had made her feel once more. Grasping for some self-control, she went to her cabin.

Tam’s space was orderly again. Eating something might ground her. The green candy was gone. Tam had nibbled away the extras she’d picked up for Hosna. She realized she should still have the Clif bar Hosna had packed for her three weeks ago. Going to find it, she paused over her two cellphones. The Motorola Razr’s silver case was tarnished iridescent pink, like it, too, had died happy in Deus Brânquia’s hands. The cheap little brick was charged up, waiting for the moment when it quit displaying SEM SINAL. When she could try and see what had happened to Hosna.

Tam’s tears swelled her throat again. Suddenly, the Clif bar was the most important thing in the world. Burrowing through the lucky bag for it, Tam found…its wrapper. Someone had slit it open and eaten the bar. Tam knew who else had explored this bag. Elisa…

Her moment’s smile at that didn’t stop her tears. She knew her river story, now. Archaeologists like her learned it in their 101 classes. For it was humanity’s oldest: the epic of Gilgamesh. The god-king Gilgamesh had journeyed a river and despoiled a forest. Through this sin, Gilgamesh had lost his greatest friend, gone to seek him in the underworld. Only to return empty-handed: bereft of both his friend who he had loved, and of the green branch of immortal life. With nothing but failure and death.

Just as she reached to wipe her face on a shirt, a sound startled her. The cheap cellphone, sturdy as a rainforest roach, had begun to chirp.

Tam fumbled it up. A tiny chart with one bar black displayed on its screen. Reception had returned abruptly, and with it, a message. And another, and another, and another. Tam poked at the thing until the text messages were displaying, but between her blurred vision and trembling hands, she could barely read them. She mopped her face on the shirt and composed herself to redial the most recent message’s number. Again, extra work, retries, for it wasn’t a U.S. number. It led to an odd, metallic ring.

“ _Hola?_ ” The greeting was Spanish, but that voice, oh, that voice.

Tam gasped, “Hosna!”

“Tamar! Did my texts get through? My voice?”

“Hosna!”

“The voicemail message is like Spanish but not. Is it you?”

“Hosna. I don’t know. I - Where are you?”

“I deported myself. I’m in Ecuador.”

“Ecuador!” Ecuador was _close_. The next country over.

“You were out of reception, or they took your phone, or something. I wasn’t staying for Occam to get their hands on me. So, I talked to an immigration lawyer. Ecuador, they don’t extradite very much. I speak the language. It’s not Syria.”

“So you just got yourself out. While you could.” Hosna had rescued herself, instead of waiting for Tam to do it.

“I had to. I’m sorry, _habibi_.”

“Don’t be. Everything went to shit here.”

“They decided hunting a fish man was crazy and stopped?” Hosna asked, hopefully.

“Ah. No. I. I have some things I need to tell you.”

“I, as well.” They both paused.

Tam swallowed. "What are yours?"

“Mmmm...before I left, I emptied the checking account and took half our art out of its frames. Sarah forwarded me funds from your share of the trust for next year.”

"My stepsister sent you money." Sarah was such a pushover. Thank God.

“Yes, I called her and Tim. I didn’t say much, just that I was leaving the country, immigration problems while you are away. When I say I want to go without the authorities knowing, as much as I can, Tim cannot resist showing off, telling me how. I almost got to the airport, no problem. Then, there was a problem. Do you know the BPRD?”

“Who?”

“Bureau of Paranormal blah blah. They wanted a word with me. I thought your Occam had sent them, so I threw the book at them.”

Tam beamed. Hosna still had these little moments with English, slipping up with acronyms and sayings. “Darling, it’s the other way around. They throw the book at you.”

“No, no. I definitely throw a book at them. I’ll explain later, maybe. I…need to tell you more about us Al-Hazreds.”

Tam sighed with relief. “Oh my God. I have stories about my family, too. My father. He was worse than I ever – I’m sorry. Go on.”

“Anyway, BPRD didn’t know about your Occam so they go to have a talk with them. I feel sorry for Occam when they get there.” Hosna sounded very satisfied about that.

“Really?” Tam thought of whoever had invented the sarcophagus, its range from tropical to arctic, and rejoiced.

“I get to leave in the end so I don’t care. Tim says stay off the internet, very few calls back, don’t go out much, all those things get tracked. So I stayed in and read all of Isabel Allende.”

“Where’s Falada?”

“I sent her to Tim. He says she is a horse, not a dog.”

Tam thought about the Russian wolfhound shedding her white fur on Tim’s dark clothes. Flopping her eighty-pound weight over him when he sat down. Lightening Tim’s moods with her quirky, gentle presence. “Guess I’ll have to forgive him now.”  

Hosna cracked. “ _Ya allah!_ Why aren’t you yelling at me? I took our money and pillaged our art and left the house and America. I sent your precious dog baby to your perverted brother who you are disowning. All of it the opposite of what you said.” She paused to inhale. “Either you met somebody hot or you killed someone.”

“It’s both. But nothing came of the first one.”

“You killed someone?" Hosna gasped.

"A couple someones." At this rate, Tam wasn't sure if it was two or seven. “One of them was self-defense.” Self-defense enough that Verdugo’s death occupied her least of all.

Hosna sounded impressed. “Do they let you leave the country now?”

“We might have a permit that covers it,” Tam said.  

“And you are calm about this. _Who_ are you and _what_ have you done with my girlfriend?”

Tam laughed, her voice cracking. “I don’t know anymore. Wait ‘till you see my hair.” Inspiration hit her like a fifteen-kilo anchor. “Stay in Ecuador, darling. I’ll come and meet you there. I'll tell you everything and you can decide.”

Hosna had an edge as she said, “Decide? What is there to decide? It’s up to you. You are the one who will be going back. I do not think I can return.”

“I’m not leaving you if you’ll have me. Wherever you are.” 

“Well, I…” Hosna sounded very pleased. “I really need to tell you more about my family.”

“I don’t care. I mean, I’ll listen. Just, please, let me come to you. It’ll be better in person. Tell me where…” Hosna, as meticulous an administrator as ever, made sure Tam had all the details. Tam wrote them in the notebook puckered by Elisa's wet hands. She'd copy Hosna's information out and then burn it. God forbid there was any useful amphibian DNA on the pages. One less trace of Deus Brânquia and his mate. A pity: Elisa's snappy comments were as close as Deus Brânquia’s river people would ever get to a sacred text.  

Tam asked, “Did you bring the cuneiform from the bedroom?”

“Yes. I didn’t want to leave it for some military idiot when – ”

“It's fine, darling, it's fine. Can you – would you read me the translation?”

Hosna inhaled and recited.

_Humans are born, they live, then they die, this is the order that the gods have decreed. But until the end comes, enjoy your life, spend it in happiness, not despair. Savor your food, make each of your days a delight, bathe and anoint yourself, wear bright clothes that are sparkling clean, let music and dancing fill your house, love the child who holds you by the hand, and give your wife pleasure in your embrace._

The very, very end of the tale of Gilgamesh, in the voice of her lover. Tam wiped her face again and said, “Thank you.”

“I will hold you to all that when I see you. Especially the last one.”

Tam leaned over, closed her cabin door’s latch. She dropped her voice. “Tell me more.”

Fifteen minutes later, Tam ended the call. Hosna’s voice was, again, rich with satisfaction. She purred _Chao_ for goodbye, sounding South American already. Tam stretched on her bunk, completely lax. After a long exhale, she re-zipped her trousers. She’d needed that. Deus Brânquia’s sweep of healing had done _something_ to her hormones.

She sighed, considering how Hosna, vivid with intellect and emotion, love most of all, was barely welcome in any country. Deus Brânquia, a being linked to life itself, was noted in the government’s records as a monstrous cryptid. Elisa, a living miracle, that woman ahead of her time, was down as a mere mute footnote to the cryptid’s case. What a world.

Tam got up. It was time for her to match Hosna’s practical ruthlessness. She went into the others’ cabins and cased them for cash and impersonal valuables. Then, she descended into the hold for a cold plunge into the freezer-tomb. She finished by going up to the second deck and ransacking Diosa’s cabin.

From there, it was a few steps into the galley next door. Yaní was waiting, arms folded. Without speaking, Tam split most of the take into two piles on the galley table. She slid one pile towards the other woman. Just as Diosa, at this same table, had slid Tam a lighter.

This, too, was not Yaní’s crime, but she accepted its results. It was foolish not to. Yaní sealed the exchange by handing Tam a plate of rice and beans with a few _verduras_ on top. She sat down by her own plate, alternating bites and examining what she’d received.

Tam accepted her food and sat down. She waited until Yaní seemed satisfied to speak. “I need your help. Still want to kill a Strickland?”

Yaní pressed her lips together. Her amber eyes burned. “Talk, gringo.”

Tam was encouraged. _Gringo_ was a step up from _filha da Strickland_. As she talked, she took out some of the things she’d taken: a fisherman’s hat, a passport, a wallet, a crucifix. The paperwork for the boat’s ownership. At the end, she asked, “Will you?”

The hive of forty years’ frustration inside Yaní hummed. Yet she said, “For the sake of Deus Brânquia. And to spit on a Strickland’s grave.”

Tam knew what her grave would look like, thanks to Deus Brânquia’s glimpse of the future. Not her death, but an ending. Along with a way to begin again. “The gravestone only. Not the grave.”

“Mmmph.”

They ate for a few minutes. When they were almost done, Tam asked, “Did you meet Deus Brânquia before 1962?”

“Mmmph.”

“You must have some interesting stories,” Tam hinted.

“Yes.”

Tam let an expectant silence expand.

Yaní looked up from her plate. She said, scathingly, “I am not telling them to _you_.”

Tam went rigid at imposing. She forced herself to stay at this table, to finish what Yaní had given her. She’d had enough uncomfortable family dinners, she reflected, to make it through one more.

When Tam slunk into the galley to do the dishes, she heard water sloshing over the lowest deck. Tree limbs were bumping the hull. She went down to extend the anchor chains. The river tributary had widened in the past two hours. After days of rain, the Amazon's flood season had begun. Ten to thirty feet of water would rise, swamping the forests. Tam expected it would be severe in this area: that no humans lived here for a reason.

Tam looked back upriver, towards the lost garden of Deus Brânquia. The flood would drown everything she’d left behind. The easel, the weapons, the flowers. The slender paths walked by Elisa and her gill-god, the orchids he'd nourished. Her old self.

She’d let Tamara Caldwell – Tammy Strickland – die there. Occam’s successors couldn’t interrogate her if she was dead. Tam’s pockets were weighed with Diosa’s passport and wallet, Diosa’s braid. With that braid streaming from under a hat, and Diosa’s clothes and sunglasses, Tam’s pared-down, sunburnt self could start to be another woman. People saw what they expected to see – Elisa’s trickery in 1962 had proved that. With Yaní's backup, she’d probably make it through handing over the bodies to Brazilian authorities, signing the boat over to Yaní. There was no way she could conjure up Diosa’s charm. Being laconic would pass, under the circumstances. She’d escape all her past names, after one final stop.

There’d be a grave in Santa Isabel. Along with Tam’s name on her gravestone, Diosa’s body would have the best Tam had to give. The white suit for her funeral shroud, Tam's bits of gold jewelry for grave goods, the lucky bag for her pillow. If anything would take Diosa’s shade to Deus Brânquia’s mercy, the lucky bag would. Tam would light candles in the church for Henríquez, father and daughter. Maybe another one for a pair of Stricklands, not that they deserved it.

Then she’d make her own little way, bribe by bribe, to the place Hosna had named in Ecuador. If Hosna should happen to take up with a Brazilian captain who’d brought her news, supported her about her lover’s death, well… Tam smiled at the thought.

Without the lucky bag, she’d have to trust whatever grace of Deus Brânquia clung to her. For Yaní was right. The price of still living in this hard, hungry world after truly experiencing Deus Brânquia was silence to protect him. Them. Tam thought of Elisa Esposito, ever mute, ever protective. Diosa, her motivations never known for sure. Her mother and Zelda, masking what they knew in cryptic advice. Giles, showing, never telling. The few she could speak to – she’d have to do better at leaving them alive.

Tam regretted every death, save Verdugo. She’d tried to talk herself into it. Verdugo had family somewhere; he was a Brazilian; he hadn’t known what it might mean that his grandfather had died with Deus Brânquia. Nothing overcame the other moments around him. How his entire world supported him flirting outrageously with Diosa. How he’d gone from oily smiles to knowing sneers when the boat’s gossip outed Tam. Diosa, too, had tried to kill her, but Verdugo had disrespected her while he was at it. Tam's failure about this showed her that Deus Brânquia hadn’t healed everything she’d suffered in her life. The whole world was waiting to come down on her again. As had happened to Yaní, surviving Strickland’s village genocide.

Her limits made her wonder. Was it possible to have a world with both humanity and Deus Brânquia? Where someone could learn their awful, challenging lessons – of love and mercy - and really live that way? She and Yaní were trying, for all their prickliness and wounds.

At least Tam’s failures and successes had left the unseen flood of the world in place, to give the next generation a chance. Tam doubted she could do much more than that. Her career, her privileges, would be lost to her. She’d never see friends, colleagues, chosen family again. Wherever she wound up, she’d be the migrant out of place.

Still. Tam had learned that, if she could tear herself away from Deus Brânquia and Elisa, she could stand almost anything. Even the silence. Even going through the rest of it alone. She hoped Hosna would forgive her enough that she didn’t have to. That chance, alone, was precious.

Light flared along the dark river. Worried, Tam strained to see whether it was a boat or someone on the shore. After a moment, it cleared, split: a pair of lights. They coursed below the river’s surface, approaching fast. The coffee-colored flood lit up around them, shimmering bronze. Tam held her breath, curled her being inward, made herself harmless.

She was rewarded by the briefest glimpse of two vivid, near-human silhouettes, framed in shifting gold light with blue flashes. Arced together, in ravishing sync, they swept past the boat to rocket up the river, fast as dolphins. Their passage left Tam’s mind untouched. She ached at that, but dashed to the prow to see Deus Brânquia and Elisa on their way. Two shapes in the water, sheltered by the elements, untouched by darkness or time, linking life and death. Nobody’s creatures but their own.

Tam felt a hot flicker on her hand. Yaní was at the prow, too, on the next level up, smoking a cigarette. Tam leaned out, called, “Did you see?”

“Yes,” Yaní said.

Tam sensed that there was more. She waited for Yaní’s change of heart, a word of wisdom.

Yaní tapped her cigarette over the railing. After a draw, she spoke. “The dishes?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> \- _filha da Strickland/filha da puta_ \- Portuguese, Strickland's daughter/daughter of a whore.  
>  \- _1962\. Strickland brought his men to my home...and had his soldiers kill all the men there, anyway. For the silence.”_ Yaní's take on an event from the _Shape of Water_ novel.  
>  \- _BRPD/I throw a book at them_ \- Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense from the Hellboy universe - and what book might someone with a link to the Lovecraftian sorcerer Al-Hazared have a copy of?  
>  \- _Chao_ \- South American, "ciao", informal/temporary/cheeky goodbye. Sometimes even hello.
> 
> Thank you to everyone who's been reading, especially for the kudos and the COMMENTS! You are all AMAZING, thank you. It's been as much of a trip to write as it has been to read, believe me. 
> 
> This is a standalone but there's more of Tammy in another story of mine, [The Man of the Future](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13877352): Chapter 2 has Tam's visit to Giles Dupont, and Chapter 5 has Tam being something of a diva when their father's stash of photos of Elisa are uncovered.  
> I've also been known to take prompts... _Chao chao!_

**Author's Note:**

> All start-of-chapter quotes are from the _Shape of Water_ novel by Guillermo del Toro and Daniel Kraus.  
>  This story stands alone - you don't have to have read any of my other _Shape of Water_ fics. But if you have, this ties in to them all.


End file.
